The third UG2 workshop aimed to help strengthen and coordinate underwater glider activities for marine monitoring, services, and scientific research as well as provide an opportunity for collaboration between U.S. UG2 and the broader global community. The goals of the workshop were to: 1) share research and development accomplishments across the community and 2) refine and build-on deliverables for the Underwater Glider User Group.

This workshop brought together the global underwater glider community to strengthen international collaboration through community dialogue, exchanges of information, sharing of experiences, and development of best practices to support the glider community. The event consisted of plenaries, break out sessions, glider lab tours, and poster sessions and vendor booths spread out over 2.5 days.

COORDINATED OPERATIONS

How do we facilitate the communication to coordinate operations when it makes sense? This includes sharing resources (i.e. cost, payloads, etc), data sharing, and if possible placing gliders to optimize improvement in model uncertainty (physical, biological, etc.)? How do we boost participation in long-duration and/or large-scale glider surveys and coordinate with consumers in the value chain (e.g., modelers).

TRAINING

To fully document operational training requirements from the glider community from pre-deployment to data analysis/management and identify current training curriculums and current gaps. This can binned into four categories: Hardware, Software, Data Analytics, and Sensors.

DOCUMENTING BEST PRACTICES

Building on the work completed at the 2019 workshop and the recent May 2021 OceanGlider/EGO Best Practices workshop.

CONNECTING WITH INDUSTRY

Engage with industry (i.e. glider and sensor manufacturers) with the goal of improving communications, information access, the customer service experience (i.e. decreasing wait times), etc.