Date
13/10/2020
Organized and promoted by the EuroGOOS Technology Plan Working Group and the EuroGOOS Office, the First EOOS Technology Forum will bring together the European marine instrument manufacturers, technicians, technologists, and scientists.
EuroGOOS, through its Technology Plan Working Group, aims to launch a permanent EOOS Technology Forum to discuss the adequacy of observing technologies in meeting current and evolving requirements and strengthen the links between ocean technology users, developers, and providers in Europe. EuroGOOS, together with the European Marine Board (EMB), co-chairs the EOOS Steering Group and Advisory Committee, and has been the lead developer of the EOOS implementation plan 2018-2022, which features Technology Forum as one of its actions.
The EOOS Technology Forum will aim to:
- Break down the barriers between the private and public sectors, and between industry and the scientific community, by building a sharing community of individuals, groups and organizations to facilitate the healthy exchange of information, knowledge and expertise;
- Initiate a mapping and assessment of the technologies employed in operational oceanography in Europe, in the physical, biogeochemical and biological domains, working across institutions, companies and individuals;
- Identify the main gaps in operational areas, from the perspective of operations in observing technologies (e.g. calibration and reference material, deployment and recovery, data reliability, data sharing and data formats, biofouling, etc);
- Identify equipment needed to systematically measure the EOVs defined by the Global Ocean Observing System, GOOS;
- Foster partnerships to promote the development of instrumentation to meet the observing requirements;
- Identify themes and propose future workshops and events focusing on observing technologies.
About EOOS
The European Ocean Observing System (EOOS) is a coordinating framework designed to align and integrate Europe’s ocean observing capacity in the long-term. This integration has been long-recognized as essential and much-needed to:
- Promote a systematic and collaborative approach to collecting sustained information on the state and variability of Europe’s seas and the global ocean;
- Inform measures to protect and conserve the marine environment and to underpin sustainable development, protection and conservation of the marine environment and its resources;
- Enable the incorporation of new technologies into the regional observing systems as they progress sufficiently through established technology readiness levels (TRLs).
Accomplishing these goals will require an overarching platform for pursuing technological compatibility and innovation at transnational scale.
Technology underpins ocean observing, and fast technological advances are rapidly revolutionizing marine monitoring and research. A good example is the case of monitoring of biogeochemical and ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) defined in the GOOS Framework for Ocean Observing. Systematic measurements of many of these biogeochemical variables is an ongoing technological challenge where new genomic technologies (and observatories based on -omics) are starting to offer some solutions.
Current understanding of the effectiveness of many established technologies in gathering observations, particularly in the case of autonomous field operation over long unattended deployments, needs also to be improved. Other urgent issues are the attainment of a certain degree of technical and operational standardization amongst data producers, sharing of expertise, and common methodologies for assessing observing capabilities and evaluating the comparability of the acquired measurements.
Participation is free of charge for EOOS Technology Forum attendees. To participate, please enter the SeaTechWeek virtual platform by creating an account here.
The agenda of the event is available here:
EOOS Tech Forum 13 October 2020 Final Agenda (166.1 KiB)
Location
Virtual
