The Past, Present and Future of OceanGliders

1989

The concept came before the technology. The concept of autonomous underwater gliders for sustained ocean observation was first articulated by Henry Stommel in 1989. In a visionary essay titled "The Slocum Mission", Stommel imagined a global fleet of 1,000 gliders monitoring the ocean from a dedicated mission control centre, technology that did not yet exist. The Slocum glider was subsequently developed by engineer Doug Webb and named after the essay. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the first operational gliders were demonstrated, and the concept Stommel had imagined began to take shape.

2000s

Individual efforts, a common direction. At OceanObs'99, glider technology was promising but not yet mature enough for large-scale sustained observing. Through the 2000s, regional programmes expanded (primarily in the United States, Europe, and Australia), building operational experience and developing the data management infrastructure needed to move from individual deployments to coordinated networks. The European Gliding Observatories (EGO) workshop in 2005 marked the beginning of formal community coordination, followed by a series of annual symposia that established shared best practices, common data standards, and the international relationships that underpin the network today.

2009

Technology matures, community grows. By OceanObs'09, glider technology was maturing and the community had grown substantially, with experienced operators regularly completing deployments of weeks to months over thousands of kilometres and mission success rates approaching 90%.

2016

Formal recognition within GOOS. OceanGliders was formally established in September 2016 to coordinate and enhance global glider activity, bringing this distributed community under a shared framework. In October 2017, OceanGliders received approval from the Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) as a formal component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). By OceanObs'19, glider technology was considered operationally mature, with an estimated fleet of over 500 active instruments deployed by institutions across the USA, Europe, China, Australia, Canada, and beyond.