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“I walk into our control room, with its panoply of views of the sea. There are the updated global pictures from the remote sensors on satellites, there the evolving maps of subsurface variables, there the charts that show the position and status of all our Slocum scientific platforms, and I am satisfied that we are looking at the ocean more intensely and more deeply than anyone anywhere else.” Henry Stommel (1989)
Exploring the global ocean has been a fundamental factor driving human society. Historically humans have relied on ships to provide platforms to live, travel and explore the oceans for centuries. After ships, the next great technical evolution in ocean exploration was the development of satellite remote sensing. This revolution in the 1970’s provided a synoptic global perspective that has fundamentally altered our view of the world’s surface ocean. The advent of ocean robots in the last decade have ushered in the next technical revolution in oceanography. The robots provide a large subsurface picture of the ocean. We in the Coastal Ocean Observation Lab are committed to moving the robot revolution forward.
In Lithuania in 2006, Dr. Rick Spinrad from NOAA sat us down. He looked at us and began the conversation with, “For the good of your country, you must inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers and I want you to cross an ocean basin with a robot.” That was daunting… Since then in collaboration with Webb Research, we have focused on Dr. Sprinrad’s challenges. We believe that developing a permanent presence in the ocean using robots is a powerful tool to inspiring the next generation of the scientists and engineers. Therefore we wish to develop long duration flights and to have these missions conducted by young scientists during their undergraduate years. We believe this will be critical showing young people that science, engineering and exploration is the most rewarding career possible.
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 The Slocum Mission Control Center on Nonamesset Island - Original idea and drawing by Henry Stommel
 Doug Webb with one of his gliders preparing for its first at sea mission in Tuckerton, NJ
 COOLRoom Operational Center today
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