Why an OceanGliders program ?

The ocean covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and impacts many of our daily life concerns. From its role in the climate system to the numerous services it provides to the world population, ocean is part of our environmental, social, economical and cultural earth equilibrium. There is today a common agreement in scientific and political communities on the needs to observe and monitor the ocean on the long term in various domains like ocean Physics, BioGeoChemistry (BGC), Biology and Ecosystems.

This international coordination of ocean observations is named Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and is piloted by UNESCO/IOC (Intergouvernemental Oceanographic Commission) and WMO (World Meteorological Organization). It is organized through international programs like Argo for profiling floats, DBCP for drifting and moored buoys, OceanSites for moorings, GO-SHIP for repeated hydrology, GLOSS for sea level observations and SOT for the ship based measurements. Launched in September 2016 during the 7th EGO conference, the OceanGliders program is now officially considered by the WMO/IOC Joint Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) as the glider component of the GOOS and is engaging in the global system through interactions with the WMO/IOC JCOMM Observations Coordination Group (OCG) and the GOOS expert panels, the OOPC ,the IOCCP, and the Biology and Ecosystems Panel .

Gliders have unique capacities to connect open ocean and coastal processes and to sample the ocean at the regional scale, and also in terms of payload capacity, and the OceanGliders program is organized around themes for which gliders are particularly fit-for-purpose (Boundary Currents, Storms, Water Transformations, …) as well as Data Management. Our goal here is to coordinate and monitor the global glider activity, share the scientific requirements, efforts and  knowledge needed under these thematics and support the dissemination of glider data in global databases, in real-time and delayed mode, for a wider community.