Implementing and sustaining an end-to-end coastal observing system: Lessons learned — GoMOOS

GoMOOS, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, was initially conceived in 1998 as a new, multi-institution research organization devoted to remotely sensing, interpreting, and modeling the physical and biological conditions of a productive and heavily exploited marginal sea. However, by the time of its formal founding in 1999, its mission had evolved from one of a research organization to one of a service organization - essentially a cooperative utility that would provide data and data products on a 24/7 basis to a wide range of end users, including but not exclusively or even primarily researchers. Now completing its sixth year, including five years of continuous, hourly data reporting from 10 buoys (and, more recently, high frequency radar stations) around the Gulf of Maine, the evolution of GoMOOS's mission continues. It increasingly views itself as the catalyst for a distributed system of predictions relating to the marine environment. This system bridges research and operations, and seeks interoperability and synergies among a wide array of oceanographic, biological, and geological players in the marine environment. The combination of new data acquisition, both for real time and archived applications, and of progressive data management for the purpose of interoperability among many institutions with distributed ocean observations, is central to the strategy to sustain an ocean observing system in the Gulf of Maine.