SOCIB glider facility

The SOCIB Glider Facility is an example of new technologies being progressively implemented in coastal to open ocean regions allowing autonomous and sustained high-resolution monitoring of specific areas. SOCIB-GF is fully operational in JERICO-NEXT and since 2006 has accomplished 64 missions, 1.244 days in water, 14.555 nm navigated with 39.378 vertical profiles collected. SOCIB-GF human team is composed out of 2 full-time engineers, 1 full-time technician, 2 part-time field-technicians (for at sea operations), 2 part time engineers (for glider data management) and 2 part-time experienced scientists. An intense and fruitful collaboration with IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB) team also exists since the origin of glider operations. The fleet in 2016 consists of 7 Slocum gliders and 2 iRobot Seagliders, equipped for collecting both physical (T, S) and biogeochemical data (fluorescence, oxygen, etc.) at high spatial resolutions (2km). SOCIB-GF includes a pressure chamber (1.000 m) as well as ballasting and operations labs. It also has access to other SOCIB facilities such as (1) ETD (Engineering & Technology Development): Hurricane Zodiac 9.2 m RIB, Lab-Van and harbour warehouse; (2) SOCIB-R/V: a 24 m coastal catamaran and (3) Data Center: including data management, public repository, on-line web-based platform tracker -for mission monitoring- and development of tools such as the glider processing toolbox (Troupin et al., Methods in Oceanog., 2015, - freely available scripts available at https://github.com/socib/glider_toolbox).