OOI Contributions Featured at 2025 Slocum Glider User’s Conference & Sentinel Launch

The global oceanographic community gathered in Woods Hole October 7–9 for the 2025 Slocum Glider User’s Conference. The meeting convened users, scientists, engineers, and mission planners to advance next-generation autonomous ocean observing.

For OOI, the event provided a timely forum to share nearly a decade of experience integrating Slocum gliders into sustained, basin-scale observing. OOI has deployed Slocums to collect high-resolution profiles of temperature, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll, nitrate, optical properties, and currents across energetic and climatically sensitive regions. These long records (gathered in all seasons and weather) have supported research on boundary currents, carbon cycling, marine heatwaves, ecosystem change, and storm-ocean interaction.

The OOI Team presented two posters at the conference, one documenting eight years of glider operations at the OOI Pioneer New England Shelf Array and the other describing the operational approach and initial outcomes from the Pioneer Mid-Atlantic Bight Array, which was started in April 2004. Diana Wickman presented a talk on “Tips, Tricks and Best Practices” for long-duration glider missions, an area where OOI has unique expertise.

The conference week concluded with the October 10 launch of the Sentinel Mission, the first attempt to autonomously circumnavigate the globe by AUV, using REDWING, a Slocum Sentinel Glider.

Diana Wickman (WHOI) gives a tour of the Glider Lab at LOSOS. © Andy Robinson / WHOI

Tour of the Glider Lab at LOSOS. © Andy Robinson / WHOI

Peter de Menocal (WHOI) speaks at Sentinel Mission Launch event. © Amber Coogan / WHOI