Near Real-time Oceanic Glider Mission Viewers

Abstract (<350 words)The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System Regional Association’s (GCOOS-RA) Data and Products Portals were designed to aggregate and integrate data and model output from distributed providers and offer these, and derived products, through a single access point in standardized ways to diverse users. The portals evolved under funding from the NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (U.S. IOOS) Program. In 2013, GCOOS-RA participated in two pilot projects with two different glider platforms. The first project focused on the feasibility of using a Liquid Robotics® (LR) Wave Glider to study ocean acidification. The second used Webb Research® Slocum profile gliders to study hypoxia over the Texas-Louisiana shelf.

The first project, led by the University of Southern Mississippi, was a 36-day mission supporting NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Project. The goals were to demonstrate that the Wave Gliders are suitable platforms to monitor ocean-atmosphere fluxes of CO2 and to give GCOOS-RA the opportunity to develop automated workflows for LR glider data. The second project involved two deployments of a subsurface Teledyne Webb Slocum G2-200m gliders provided by Texas A&M University’s (TAMU) Geochemical Environmental Research Group (GERG); the first during a portion of the August 2013 “Mechanisms Controlling Hypoxia” cruise conducted by the TAMU Department of Oceanography and the second for about 30 days in October. The goals of these two deployments were to test the feasibility of collecting temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen data near the seabed in relatively shallow (20-40m) water, and to compare and validate and merge cruise data with a glider’s information.

One important outcome of the pilot projects was the development of a web map application in using ArcGIS web Web Mapping API to show data acquired from the glider deployments with a time slider. Because data sets from the projects were not directly reported to a GCOOS server, GCOOS-RA had to download and reformat the data to make it GIS-ready. With the ArcGIS Server and Python scripts, a time-aware glider-track layer was automatically generated in enterprise database, and updated in near real-time. This process will be applied to visualize future near real-time observations from all surface and subsurface glider platforms.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System

a. Profiling gliders monitoring after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

3. The National Context for Gliders: The National Glider Network Plan

4. The GCOOS Approach with Gliders

a. Slocum profiling gliders monitoring Harmful Algal Blooms (Karenia brevis) in

Southwest Florida,

b. Pilot Project 1: A surface Wave Glider monitoring ocean acidification in the

northern Gulf of Mexico, and

c. Pilot Project 2: Slocum profiling gliders being tested in the western Gulf of

Mexico.

5. Lesson Learned and Future Plan

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Introduction

The storytelling article published in the April 1989 issue of Oceanography by the late Dr. Henry

Stommel (Stommel, 1989) prophesied unmanned vessels continuously surveying the world's

oceans while transmitting data daily to researchers. Stommel’s prediction is well on its way to

becoming a reality with increasing glider vehicle technologies and international deployments.

Profiling gliders, long-range autonomous underwater gliding vehicles (AUGVs), offer a means

to collect high-resolution in situ ocean data from a wide range of sensors at a relatively low cost

compared to conventional methods such as vessels and mooring arrays. Profiling gliders can be

buoyancy-driven or propeller-driven and fly underwater in sawtooth pattern collecting horizontal

and vertical profiles of hydrographic conditions. More recently, the Wave Gliders, the first

unmanned autonomous marine robots to generate propulsion using the ocean’s endless supply of

wave energy, have been deployed as platforms from which ocean data are gathered and

communicated in near real-time. Together, these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities to

observe and understand the world ocean.

Compared to traditional ocean sampling methods, gliders offer many benefits. Foremost in a

challenging economy is their cost-effectiveness. Operating gliders demands fewer man-hours

relative to equivalent operations conducted using vessels, and unlike most ship-based equipment,

gliders can be adaptively re-tasked and re-routed to fill data gaps, repeat a transect, or approach

new targets of interest. Increasingly, glider development is moving toward ‘plug and play’

capacity so that the platforms can carry varied and interchangeable instruments that measure and

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evaluate different oceanographic and air/sea interface attributes. This means sensors on the glider

can be swapped out for different measuring devices depending on the needs of each mission.

Recognizing the utility and cost-effectiveness of gliders, the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing

System (U.S. IOOS®) Program has embarked on an effort to outline a National Glider Network

Plan. Data from these mobile platforms are expected to contribute significantly to the growing

demand for sustained observations, needed to address issues ranging from climate change and

severe weather forecasts to ecosystem management and water quality monitoring. For example,

boundary currents such as the Gulf Stream along the eastern seaboard pass through the coastal

ocean and are important drivers of climate change. In the Gulf of Mexico, the Loop Current and

its associated eddies dominate meso-scale circulation and the potential strength and track of

hurricanes entering the Gulf. Gliders in the coastal and nearshore environment also serve many

interests and issues specific to understanding the sources of water entering and exiting the Gulf

shelf and movement of waters (e.g. coastal currents, freshwater runoff) acting as potential

physical controls and drives for the dispersion of pollutants (nonpoint source, oil, etc.), Harmful

Algal Bloom (HAB), and the extent and duration of hypoxia (low bottom dissolved oxygen)

events.

Expanding the use of gliders in the Gulf of Mexico is a necessary step in providing the

geographical coverage and the long-term data needed to support science-based decisions

regarding the ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico. Successful expansion can best be achieved

through collaborative partnerships. It is critical that the Gulf glider community be prepared to

develop the Gulf glider network according to the needs of Gulf stakeholders. The U.S. IOOS®

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Regional Associations and partners are heavily engaged in glider operations and, in many

instances, are leading the way on their uses and mission applications. This article describes the

national context and current status of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System

Regional Association (GCOOS-RA) with regard to acquiring, processing, and delivering ocean

observing and monitoring data acquired from sensors on gliders.

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The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System

The GCOOS-RA is one of 11 regional components of the U.S. IOOS®, a cooperative effort of

federal and non-federal entities to provide new data, tools and forecasts to improve marine

safety, enhance the economy, and protect the U.S. coastal and ocean environment.

Figure 1. Eleven Regional Associations (RAs) of Ocean Observing Systems across the United States. The RAs serve the nation’s coastal communities, including the Great Lakes, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands and territories. More details.

Because the Gulf of Mexico is a national treasure and an economic driver for the country, there

exists a delicate balance between environmental protection and economic development. All

along the nearly 17,000 miles of shoreline (if bays and other inland waters are included) from

Florida to Texas, there are great demands from industries including commercial and recreational

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fisheries, oil and gas extraction and exploration, ports, and tourism. The rich biodiversity of the

region, combined with the dense human population, dictate that diligent monitoring take place to

understand and protect the wealth of natural resources and to protect human life and property.

The GCOOS-RA has invested in the development of a system that provides observations and

products needed by users in the region for these diverse purposes. Among the regional

monitoring priorities are preserving and restoring healthy marine ecosystems; managing

resources; ensuring human health; detecting and predicting climate variability and consequences;

facilitating safe and efficient marine transportation, enhancing national security; and protecting

and mitigating against coastal hazards.

Building the GCOOS requires a partnership of many organizations - from governments to

industry to academia to educators to the public - to integrate the measurements already being

made and to fill gaps where necessary to meet regional and national requirements.

Since 2000, the GCOOS has been growing toward an integrated system of federal and non-

federal observing assets and data. The GCOOS priorities are organized around themes that

illustrate the broad, beneficial uses of observing system activities. Rather than invest limited

funds in its own instrumentation, the GCOOS-RA has maximized funds by leveraging existing

non-proprietary private, local, state, academic and federal assets to build the GCOOS. The

program is in the early stages of development, with clearly articulated plans for growth.

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On April 20, 2010, the DeepWater Horizon (DWH) oil spill incident in the Gulf of Mexico

began with a tragic explosion. Specific GCOOS contribution to the response to the oil spill were

numerous and included the following: 1) Providing ready access to near real-time, and historical

data; 2) Creating new data layers for the Environmental Response Management Application

(ERMA) used by the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration; 3) Delivering model results

from the Regional Oceans Model System and wind forecasts; 4) Rapid re-installation of High

Frequency Radar (HFR) along at-risk shorelines; 5) Web access to compiled oil spill resources;

and 6) Gulf-wide education and outreach efforts to support effective communications about the

spill.

In addition to the GCOOS-RA, other IOOS regions contributed expertise during the DWH event,

demonstrating the power of a coordinated network. The GCOOS-RA, SECOORA, the Mid-

Atlantic Region Coastal Ocean Observing System (MARACOOS), and the Southern California

Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS) all collaborated and coordinated glider missions to

identify and track the subsurface oil plume from the Macondo Well. Fleets of seven gliders with

specialized sensors were deployed by IOOS partners to help identify the presence of oil in the

water column. The gliders identified a search zone for the subsurface oil and helped define the

likely movement of the oil. Temperature and salinity profiles were also acquired from sensors on

the gliders. This was the first known spill response effort to execute a coordinated multi-gliders

operation.

An important contribution made by the GCOOS-RA was to convert glider and float data from

the Deepwater Gulf Response incident site into map service layers for display on the site, as well

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as for use in the ERMA. These layers were two-dimensional, with metadata, pointers to pre-

computed graphic displays of the associated profile data, and pointers to the actual data. The

GCOOS developed an interactive map showing the gliders’ tracks and temperature and salinity

profiles at glider surfacing.

Figure 2. A web map application displays gliders and floats path and temperature and salinity profiles at their surfacing with a time-slider. This is a part of DeepWater Horizon oil spill response.

This interactive map provided time-aware glider and float layers, which store information about

the changing sate of glider and float over time. This function allows users to track glider and

float paths with a time-slider. Despite important contributions to post-DWH monitoring, data

processing and information distribution, it was an ad hoc system, one that would be greatly

improved with a thoughtful infrastructure in place. Developing monitoring plans need to include

such infrastructure.

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The National Context for Gliders: The National Glider Network Plan

As described above, gliders are becoming increasingly common as effective ocean observing and

monitoring tools. The U.S. IOOS® National Glider Network Plan (January 2014) states, the

ability to link coastal systems to the deep ocean requires sustained, cost-effective in situ

sampling at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Additionally, the ability to sample episodic

events requires adaptive sampling capability combined with a rapid response capability for

deployment in specific regions.

A combination of ocean observing platforms and assets, with different advantages for providing

spatial and temporal information, can be collectively used to meet these needs. For example,

ships, mobile platforms, can operate high-power, full-bandwidth high-resolution instruments to

make observations at surface and at depth and collect water samples for chemical analyses for

periods of weeks to months. However, the number of ships is limited, they are expensive to

operate, and they may not be available to respond quickly to events. Satellites make synoptic

measurements over large areas of the ocean surface several times per day, but the measurements

are largely limited to either a thin upper layer, or to information that is related to information

integrated over the water column (e.g., sea surface topography). Moorings provide persistent

time-series at 5-60 minute intervals over the water column at a fixed location for years. Gliders

are critical ocean observing platforms, because they are mobile and they provide a persistent

presence at a relatively low cost.

The IOOS National Glider Network is designed to function as a distributed system, with some

centralized data management functions that apply consistent data standards and best practices to

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achieve integration among various glider-observing assets. As the lead federal agency for U.S.

IOOS®, NOAA leads the overall plan and coordinate requirements and efforts to ensure

consistency between national and regional needs and to align with the national Data

Management and Communication (DMAC) objectives with the National Glider Network Plan.

To date, three versions of autonomous subsurface profiling gliders have demonstrated persistent

observations in an operational capacity: Scripps Institution of Oceanography Spray vehicles, The

University of Washington Seaglider, and Webb Research Slocum. All three have displayed

robust reliability and fulfilled the missions outlined above. Collectively, over 500 of the three

profiling glider versions have been manufactured and used.

The National Underwater Glider Network Map, for example, includes current and historical

glider missions dating back to 2005 and is a collaborative effort of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal

Ocean Observing System (GCOOS), Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System

(SCCOOS), Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing System (NANOOS), Central

and Northern California Ocean Observing System (CeNCOOS) and Mid-Atlantic Regional

Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (MARACOOS). The U.S. IOOS, NOAA,

Office of Naval Research (ONR), National Science Foundation (NSF), Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA), and various universities, state agencies and industries have funded gliders

displayed on this map.

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The National Glider Network Plan also provides several examples of specific issues that have

benefited from subsurface data provided by profiling gliders and how these issues will further

benefit from a national network. These include:

Emergency Response, for example, the dispersion of oil spills by currents in the Gulf of

Mexico;

Climate Variability, including El Niño/La Niña in the California Current System, the

Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream along the US east coast;

Hurricane Intensity Forecasting, relevant for the east coast, Gulf of Mexico and American

territories;

Harmful Algal Blooms throughout US coastal waters;

Hypoxia, low dissolved oxygen in bottom water, particularly in the northern Gulf of

Mexico.

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The GCOOS Approach with Gliders

Clearly, glider observations for the Gulf of Mexico are vital for responding the issues identified

in the National Glider Plan. Therefore, the GCOOS-RA is bringing together academics,

government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector to plan and

implement a glider network in the Gulf. This coordination began in 2011 through the

development of the GCOOS Glider Plan, a component of the GCOOS Build Out Plan. In April

2013, the Gulf Glider Task Team (GGTT) was constituted of glider stakeholders to develop

further the strategic and implementation plans for Gulf glider operations delineated in the

GCOOS Build Out Plan. Elements of the National Glider Strategy will also be incorporated.

The National Glider Plan calls for a set of 2-3 gliders transects in each Regional Association

domain. This will meet some, but not all of the needs for glider operations in the Gulf. However,

the associated DMAC plan includes data ingest from all glider operations and can serve those

data to any user. Glider pilot projects and partnerships between the GCOOS-RA and

stakeholders include collaborative strategies for detection of harmful algal blooms, monitoring

ocean acidification, routine measurements of water quality, and advancing Gulf research.

In 2005, GCOOS began developing the GCOOS Data Portal, designed to aggregate

observational data and model output from distributed provides and to offer these, and derived

products, through a single access point in standardized ways to a diverse set of users. GCOOS

also has an associated Data Products page, where data are fused into products tailored for

specific or general stakeholder groups. The goal of the GCOOS Data Portal and Products page is

an automated and largely unattended data system that delivers high-quality data and products to

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Gulf stakeholders. GCOOS products are mostly related to satisfying needs for consumers and are

designed for quick online browsing for a particular purpose.

Since geospatial data includes dozens of file formats and database structures already and

continues to evolve and grow to include new types of data and standards, flexible and

customizable, automated data flow is required for real-time tracking system. The Data Portal is

custom-built and uses database, PHP, andincludes, among others, web services based on Open

Geospatial Consortium standards-based Sensor Observation Service (SOS) with Observations

and Measurements (O&M) encodings. Products appearing in the Data Products portal are

primarily map applications constructed using ESRI software.

Data access for humans is through an online form and for machines is through direct access

URL, SOS, and OPeNDAP enabled software. GCOOS designs web-based mission viewers for

surface and subsurface (profiling) gliders under ArcGIS platform. Web-based mission viewers

run in near real-time when stakeholders’ gliders are operating in the Gulf and in playback mode

after a completed mission. Viewers show the glider trajectories and oceanographic data collected

and are publicly available through the GCOOS website.

The mission viewers were developed for the following four glider projects:

1. Profiling gliders monitoring after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident as described

above,

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2. Slocum profiling gliders monitoring Harmful Algal Blooms (Karenia brevis) in

Southwest Florida,

3. Pilot Project 1: A surface Wave Glider monitoring ocean acidification in the northern

Gulf of Mexico, and

4. Pilot Project 2: Slocum profiling gliders being tested in the western Gulf of Mexico.

1. See above for the Deepwater Horizon glider mission viewer

2. Profiling gliders monitoring Harmful Algal Blooms species, K. brevis

GCOOS-RA partners at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Marine Science and

Mote Marine Laboratory (MML) were coordinating glider missions to gain a better

understanding of the dominant Gulf of Mexico red tide organism Karenia brevis. This science

mission was to use tandem gliders to map the West Florida Shelf region with an emphasis on

catching a red-tide bloom in progress to gain a better understanding of how to forecast and track

harmful algal blooms. One specific project focus was to determine concentrations of K. brevis at

the pycnocline.

In typical use, gliders profile from the surface to 500-1000 m, taking 3-6 h to complete a cycle

from the surface to depth and back. During the cycle the gliders travel 3-6 km in the horizontal

for a speed of about 1 km/h. Deployments of 3-6 months are routine, during which time the

gliders survey track extends well over 2000 km. Sensors on gliders measure such physical

variables as pressure, temperature, salinity, and current, biological variables relevant to the

abundance of phytoplankton and zooplankton, and ecologically important chemical variables

such as dissolved oxygen and nitrate.

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During a few minutes on the surface, gliders obtain location by GPS and communicate through

the Iridium satellite phone system. Glider data is transmitted to shore in near real time from that

surface point, so an automate, or semi-automated national distribution and archiving scheme is

essential to making recently acquired to historical data readily available to a variety of users. At

present, glider data is received by servers at local data nodes and distributed in a variety of

formats and through several protocols to GCOOS and/or a national system such as the National

Underwater Glider Network Map described above.

This was the first opportunity for GCOOS-RA to learn automated workflow and display a glider

data set near real-time via web site. GCOOS-RA developed a mission viewer showing the

gliders’ tracks collected at locations where the gliders surfaced to obtain position fixes and

transmitted data which had been continuously recorded in their data boxes.

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Figure 3. A mission viewer displays gliders path and their system sensor information.

3. Pilot Project 1: Wave glider monitoring ocean acidification in the northern Gulf of Mexico

Ocean acidification (OA) is the ongoing decrease in the pH of the oceans, caused by the uptake

of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) as the atmospheric CO2 concentrations rise due to

anthropogenically caused emissions. About 30-40% of the carbon dioxide released by humans

into the atmosphere dissolves into the oceans, rivers and lakes. NOAA has initiated an active

monitoring and research OA program. The principal goal for the program is to develop the

monitoring capacity to quantify and track OA in open-ocean, coastal, and great lake systems.

In an effort to investigate the feasibility of new technologies in the Gulf of Mexico to monitor

changes in ocean acidity related to CO2 fluxes between the atmosphere and ocean, the University

of Southern Mississippi (USM), NOAA, GCOOS, and Liquid Robotics, Inc. collaborated to

deploy a Liquid Robotics’ Wave Glider to measure carbon dioxide, dissolved oxygen, pH, water

temperature, conductivity, air temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed and direction in

the northern Gulf of Mexico. The carbon dioxide sensor package, which measures the mole

fraction of CO2 on either side of the air-sea interface, was developed by the Monterey Bay

Aquarium Research Institute.

The team successfully deployed the glider in October 2012 from the USM R/V Tom McIlwain

near the USM Central Gulf of Mexico Ocean Observing System (CenGOOS). The location was

selected so that the glider traverse began and ended at the CenGOOS buoy, which has a similar

CO2 measuring system developed and built by the Pacific Marine and Environmental Laboratory.

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The glider was programmed to run a route around the Mississippi River Delta and traverse over

stations where the NOAA R/V Ronald H. Brown sampled in July 2012 during the second Gulf of

Mexico and East Coast Carbon program. These additional observations from the buoy and the

ship-based sampling were used to help validate the measurements taken by the Wave Glider.

Wave Gliders provide greater spatial coverage than traditional buoys and can collect data at

different depths near the surface. The key benefit of the Wave Glider is its ability to travel

anywhere without need of refueling, combined with remote control and its ability to transmit

data via satellite anywhere in the world. Despite these advantages, the Wave Glider was struck

by a vessel on the 27th night of the mission near the southernmost part of the route. The USM

and Liquid Robotics retrieved and re-launched the Wave Glider in early February 2013.

Figure 4. The University of Southern Mississippi and Liquid Robotics Re-Launch the Wave Glider in the Gulf of Mexico on Feb 12, 2013 • 3:15 pm

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GCOOS developed an interactive near real-time mission viewer showing the surface glider’s

location and data from the mission. The mission viewer also displays time-series charts by

parameter.

The near real-time Wave Glider mission viewer took several steps from aggregating data source

to showing updated sensor parameters every 10-20 minutes. There were several conditions that

needed to be considered. In earlier demo along, the east coast with other IOOS Regional

Associations (NERACOOS and MARACOOS) there were problems with bandwidth for Wave

Glider communications and the initial attempts to establish SOS did not work. Because the demo

was short, all of the data from the Wave Glider were telemetered to a Liquid Robotics Inc.

stations/server, without an automatic link to the Regional Association servers. Thus our approach

was simply aggregating data from their server instead of establishing direct link to our data-

storing ecosystem.

As with any observations, the heterogeneous devices and data formats create challenges for an

organizational data storing process. In this case, there was no push system implemented and a

data aggregation system had to be built. Near real-time observations require a robust architecture

from desktop to cloud, with a timely, extensible, and automated process. This poses similar

problems that might arise in trying to add live weather or recent earthquake information to

applications without writing long programs to do so. There are multiple approaches to tackle this

challenge, but GCOOS chose an ArcGIS Tracking Server 10.1 (predecessor of ArcGIS for

Server 10.2 GeoEvent Processor) for this project. The Tracking Server 10.1 is an independent

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server, and the engine for processing and distributing real-time data to various clients via data

links.

First, we aggregated information from the Liquid Robotics Server, which provided us the

specific URLs to retrieve CTD, weather, oxygen, and system data, respectively. Each file

contained sensor information, location (latitude and longitude in WGS84 datum) and time of

collection. The file format was comma-separated values (CSV). This process used a simple

Windows batch scripting with a handful of command line utilities (cURL, wget) to download

automatically. Scripts ran at every 10 minutes.

ArcGIS Tracking Server must know how the data is formatted as well as how the data is being

received. Then we created a new message definition and a new generic input data link

connection based on a received file. Once the data were saved in a folder, another script ran to

format data for each database schema configured in the Tracking Server and pushed the data into

the Tracking Server through the TCP socket. Although the Tracking Server is able to

convert/format data, in this case it focuses on aggregating and logged data into ArcSDE

database. ESRI provided C# and Java programs to send data through a TCP socket. We wrote a

simple Python script to do the same (ref: Python wiki). Four feature layers in ArcSDE database

updated automatically every 10 minutes if new data were downloaded.

Although Liquid Robotics Inc. provided a web-based remote control system for the Wave Glider,

which gives the current location of the glider, ArcGIS users can also see the glider location by

connecting the Tracking Server in ArcCatalog and ArcMap. If users need real-time data viewing

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with analysis capabilities, ArcGIS Tracking Analyst extension on ArcGIS Desktop offers allows

users to display, analyze, and manipulate real-time and fixed-time data.

Once the data were logged into the ArcSDE database, the information was published through

ArcGIS Server as a mapping service. This whole process is described in Figure 7.

Figure 5. Diagram of automated workflow for the Wave Glider mission viewer

While Tracking Server is the engine for processing and distributing real-time data, a separate

client application is required to view the data such as ArcGIS Desktop. We developed a web map

application (glider mission viewer) in ArcGIS Javascript API. It is a web-based application that

provides a common operating picture for monitoring and tracking an event. It has an interactive

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map, charts, gauges, and a time slider for scientific observing parameters. Basic functions such

as a measurement tool, basemap catalog, print tool, and social sharing tool were implemented as

well.

Figure 6. A mission viewer displays glider’s path and multiple observation parameters in gauge and chart with a time-slider.

This mission viewer shows near real-time temperature, salinity, pressure, conductivity, and

dissolved oxygen in gauges. Other wave glider engineering information and meteorological

information, such as wind direction and speed, are provided with an overlaid nautical chart. The

layers are also downloadable in KML (for use with Google Earth) and accessible to the data

through feature services (for use with ArcGIS).

4. Pilot Project 2. Development of a Profiling Glider Mission Viewer for Testing

The Texas A&M University Department of Oceanography and the Geochemical Environmental

Research Group (GERG) deployed a Teledyne Webb Slocum G2-200m glider during the

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Mechanisms Controlling Hypoxia (MCH) cruise in August and again over the Texas-Louisiana

Shelf in October during a Texas Automated Buoy System maintenance cruise. The glider’s

mission was to test the capability of collecting temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen data

over the shelf in relatively shallow waters of 20-40m depth and to collect hydrographic data near

and around the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. In this pilot project, GCOOS

also tested near real-time mission viewer compiled with a subsurface profiling glider’s

information.

While at the surface a glider obtains location by GPS and communicates through the Iridium

satellite phone system. Glider data are received by the GERG shore station in near real-time

every six hours and stored in a folder dedicated to that particular glider.

Figure 7. Pilot test of profiling glider for hypoxia studies in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

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There are two types of files created: a glider system health and trajectory information (SBD) file

produced while the glider was at the surface and a scientific data (TBD) file containing sensor

measurements made while the glider was submerged. GCOOS copied these files from the GERG

web site to a working folder where they were processed into engineering units and basic

products.

Trajectory files were processed using an IDL® script to produce a cumulative file and a daily file

with the latest positional data. A cumulative file was also written in KML and made available to

the IOOS map . Except processing SBD and TBD files, the processes are almost identical to that

of wave glider. Files were processed four times per day and sent to the ArcGIS 10.2 GeoEvent

Processor (upgraded from ArcGIS Tracking Server) and logged into ArcSDE database.

Figure 8. A mission viewer for Slocum profiling gliders being tested in the western Gulf of Mexico.

Science dData files were processed and graphic displays of measured parameters were produced

and posted on the web. A mission viewer showed the updated location of the profiling glider

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every six hours. Cumulative profile plots of temperature, salinity, and colored dissolved organic

matter (CDOM) were also available on the mission viewer. All glider tracks were also available

in a KML file. All processes described above were automated.

The glider tracking layers are also downloadable in KML and accessible to the data through

feature services to copy in users local environment.

Lesson Learned and Future Plan

These two pilot projects developing Mission Viewers (for the surface Wave Glider and for the

Profiling Glider Tests in the Northern Gulf of Mexico) successfully demonstrated near real-time

glider observations on using ArcGIS web Meb map Mapping applications API. The activities

and products resulted from these pilot projects weare intended to help establish a user-driven

system that is responsive to real information needs.

The GCOOS-RA will continue to broaden collaborations to advance the establishment of a

comprehensive and continuous Gulf Glider Network, and work with U.S. IOOS® community on

development of the National Glider Network Plan. In addition, GCOOS will continue working

with operators and stakeholders to develop glider data visualization tools and products (e.g. 3-D

visualizers, education and outreach activities, and profiling operations on the GCOOS website).

Establishing a glider server and asset map simplifies the distribution process for glider operators

and data users alike. Archiving this data in a repository will ensure its continued availability to

all users.

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As one example of the GCOOS-RA’s future activity with gliders with a diversity of

stakeholders, GCOOS is coordinating with Shell and NOAA to share the real-time glider data

from the Shell-NOAA collaborative met-ocean project in a GCOOS glider mission viewer. Shell,

the NOAA National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), National Centers for Environmental Prediction

(NCEP), United States Naval Academy (USNA), IOOS and USM are working together to

operate a profiling glider to collect real-time data for improving hurricane intensity predictions.

The project is currently in its second year of operation with the goal to improve the real-time

hurricane intensity forecast. This glider project is a compliment to other oceanography

measurement being made for hurricane prediction, such as the deployment of Airborne

Expendable Bathythermographs (AXBTs), which measure temperature as a function of depth,

from the NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter aircraft monitoring hurricane development and progress.

Data shared will include a profiling Seaglider’s locations and temperature data collected during

the mission in a 1-D and 3-D visualizer. While this product is in the development stage, the

profiles of temperature and salinity collected during this current mission can be viewed at the

NDBC website.

This collaboration demonstrates that gliders not only collect data to answer scientific research

questions, they are valuable tools for collecting data needed to better protect offshore oil and gas

assets and the greater Gulf Coast communities from hazards such as tropical storms and

hurricanes. Developing partnerships between industry, government, military, and academia is

important to furthering research and expanding ocean observing capacity in the Gulf of Mexico.

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References

Stommel, H. 1989. The SLOCUM mission. Oceanography, 2(1): 22-25.

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