Transition of Slocum Electric Gliders to a sustained operational system

In the 1980s Slocum Gliders were a vision of Douglas C. Webb, which Henry Stommel promoted in a science fiction article published in Oceanography in 1989. In the early 1990s the glider concept was proven and in the late 1990s open water test flights were done at LEO15. In 2002 Rutgers University COOL Group began collaborating with Webb Research Corporation on the development and deployment of the Gliders. Initially the deployments were on the order of hours to a few days with constant human supervision. By the latter half of 2003 Slocum Gliders were routinely flying multiple week missions and calling in to the automated Glider Command Center on Rutgers main campus via satellite phone to provide a status update, download data and receive any new mission commands. The ability to operate Gliders with minimal human intervention for extended periods of time has allowed Rutgers to integrate them into the New Jersey Shelf Observing System. Since November 2003 a Glider has been occupying the Endurance Line, a 123 km track located between the LEO15 nodes and the shelf break, on a monthly basis. The sustained data set being collected permits scientists to go beyond collecting snapshots of information for short-term projects and gather long-term, expanded region data sets that would allow the tracking of trends over multiple years. While the Endurance Line Glider has been flying, additional Gliders have been operating for shorter periods of time on the West Florida Shelf, in the northwestern Mediterranean and in the Hudson River plume. Like the Endurance Line Glider, these Gliders are controlled by the Glider Command Center via satellite phone. Rutgers would be adding 2 Gliders to its fleet the end of this year bringing the total to 6 electric Gliders. One Glider would be dedicated to the West Florida Shelf Red Tide research program and the second would be used in the Mediterranean to look at the significance of Sahara Desert dust on biological and optical signals. Dedication of the new Gliders to these two research projects would enable Rutgers to have a continual presence in these regions as well as on the shelf of New Jersey.