Proposals

Abstract

The Student Seaglider Center is a nascent student-run program within the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. With STF funding, the team can begin the transformation of the remnants of UW’s Seaglider Fabrication Lab into the Student Seaglider Center. Seagliders were developed at UW in the early 2000s and have contributed significantly to both scientific research and students’ education. Seagliders are autonomous underwater vehicles that are deployed from ships and used to collect data such as the temperature, oxygen level, salinity level, chlorophyll level, and density of seawater. Seagliders are unique in comparison to other equipment used to collect oceanographic data because they can be preprogrammed to go from one location to another without intervention from people or the need to spend thousands of dollars collecting these measurements from ships. Seagliders can go up and down the water column up to 1000 meters in depth and stay at sea for months, traveling thousands of miles and automatically reporting data back to scientists every time they surface. The Seaglider Fabrication Center ran from 2005-2018 and produced over one hundred seagliders. The center has become somewhat obsolete since the inventor has licensed the gliders to be sold from his company. The School of Oceanography and the Applied Physics Lab has several seagliders that were returned to UW from scientists who completed their research and no longer needed them. We are using the resources available to us to reinvent the Seaglider Fabrication Center into the Student Seaglider Center and are seeking funding for repairs and for the creation of the student center