Best Practices Task Team

OceanGliders Best Practices

The OceanGliders Best Practice Task Team aims to facilitate the sharing, development, and global convergence of best practices around all glider activities such as preparation, deployment, data management, sensor calibration, and data processing. This collective community effort will ensure that the valuable data acquired by gliders around the globe will be inter-comparable and used by a broader community to better understand our ocean. Anyone is welcome to join this effort. The most effective way is to join our OceanGliders GitHub community or contact contact@oceangliders.org if you want to contribute.

Best Practices

Best Practices are defined as a methodology that has repeatedly produced superior results relative to other methodologies with the same objective; to be fully elevated to a best practice, a promising method will have been adopted and employed by multiple organizations (Pearlman et al, 2019). Those best practices which have undergone community review and the network considers to be fully supported by the OceanGliders community will be identified as OceanGliders ‘GOOS endorsed’ and tagged as such in the IODE/GOOS (International Oceanographic Data Information Exchange/Global Ocean Observing System) oceanbestpractices.org repository.

Best Practices have always been an essential component across all areas of the observing system and the OCG (Observation Coordination Group) ocean observing networks are committed to ensuring that their best practices are comprehensive, findable, and are used. OCG, the IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO), and the WMO (World Meteorological Organisation) Integrated Global Observing Systems (WIGOS <http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/wigos/index_en.html>) are seeking increased collaboration with partner organisations towards the objective of harmonized standards, and better traceability of observations to standards. In an ongoing effort to ensure this the OceanGliders community is working at providing best practices for the life cycle of all Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) observed under the program, for each stage of the observation life cycle. OceanGliders is contributing to this effort by compiling this list of best practice documents available and will identify gaps in the documentation and where documents need to be updated.

Community review of Standard Operating Procedures

At the moment several Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are in the development namely Salinity, Oxygen, Nitrate and Depth Average Currents (DACs) measurements.

The community review for the oxygen SOP has started and is open until January 31 2022.
How to make comments or contributions is described here.