The Canary Islands Government delegation in Madrid hosted this week the annual meeting of the national Working Group on ocean gliders, currently joined by five institutions: AZTI (Basque Country), IEO/CSIC – Spanish Institute of Oceanography/Council for Scientific Research ( Madrid and Santander), SOCIB – Coastal Observation System (Balearic Islands), ULPGC – University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and PLOCAN – Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (Canary Islands).
The main goal of these working sessions, currently under coordination of PLOCAN, lies in trying to advance efficiently and synergistically in the coordination at national level between the different institutions operating this type of technology under a common roadmap, while promoting the strategy with which Spain could contribute to the future European Glider Infrastructure (RI).
The meeting agenda allowed at first instance to share between members the current state of the capabilities and activities of each of the nodes that make up this distributed and high-specialized ocean-observing network at national level, which enabled to review needs, technological opportunities and services, etc. where to implement synergies and collaborative added-value frameworks, to ultimately improve capabilities, efficiency and sustainability of the current glider contribution to the Spanish ocean-observing system.
Currently, the Spanish fleet of ocean-gliders has around twenty operational units, with scientific payloads and capabilities of various types and scope, which enables to cover a wide range of scientific-technical and operational applications in the scope of both ocean research and other strategic sectors of the Blue Economy, ultimately for the benefit of society.
