May 2026

The Eyes on the Ocean™ Newsletter is an informal way of keeping you up-to-date on U.S. IOOS® activities.

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Turbulent ocean background with images of Carl Gouldman, Derrick Snowden, and Dave Easter superimposed. Congratulates them as the 2026 Caraid Award Winners and has the IOOS Association logo at the bottom.

Observing is a year-round activity, but some places are difficult to observe over winter, and some assets need to be brought in for maintenance and/or protection from winter conditions. With spring fully upon us and summer conditions incoming, those assets are being returned to the water. Credit: © driftwood - stock.adobe.com.

It’s May, and IOOS has truly entered into collaboration season with a slate of meetings around the country digging into topics like observing systems, observing assets, data management, and modeling. Integration is part of our name, and it’s connected to everything we do at IOOS, not only with observations and data, but also with users and communities of practice. These meetings and workshops help us both shape and achieve our activities and priorities to serve the Nation.

Wrapping up this week is the 14th Radiowave Operators Working Group workshop, where new and experienced coastal high-frequency radar (HFR) operators meet up to develop procedures governing operations, provide recommendations to users, developers, manufacturers, and program managers, and build connections and collaborative relationships to strengthen HFR capabilities nationwide.

In mid-May, the 2026 Underwater Glider User Group (UG2) will convene their annual meeting, strengthening collaboration through community dialogue, exchange of information, sharing of experiences, and development of best practices.

At the beginning of June, we’ll welcome the Data Management and Cyberinfrastructure (DMAC) community back to Silver Spring for their annual meeting. The DMAC meeting brings together federal agencies, academia and the private sector partners and collaborators who manage ocean data and information to explore topics related to IOOS’ data management framework for searching, discovering, accessing, and using information. 

Finally, the 2026 IOOS Modeling Community of Practice Workshop is planned for late July. The workshop draws users from IOOS, federal agencies, academia, industry, and organizations for interactive sessions to align coastal and ocean modeling priorities. It builds on the progress made by the 2021 workshop and pushes the collaborative environment forward to establish shared definitions, coordinated strategy, and implementable next steps.

Lastly, we’re happy to announce a new IOOS-ian in our office! Martin Yapur will be with us for the next 6 months as our acting Deputy Director. Martin joins us from NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). As Chief of the Requirements, Assurance and Assessment Division (RAAD), he spearheaded strategic initiatives and oversaw the development and management of satellite requirements, data products, services, and stakeholder engagement. His extensive expertise encompasses managing large-scale data systems, coordinating complex cross-agency projects, and building partnerships with international organizations such as the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). We are excited to welcome him aboard!

From the
IOOS Office

  • Join us in Silver Spring (or virtually!) June 2 - 4 for the 2026 IOOS DMAC Meeting. The meeting is an opportunity for partners, collaborators, and users to come together and discuss coordination and communication between managers of ocean, coastal, Great Lakes data and information. The agenda has been published to the meeting page, and logistical details will be added as they become available!

  • IOOS funding opportunity under the Ocean Technology Transition Program closes July 15. Visit the U.S. IOOS Ocean Technology Transition website for more information about the program, and find more about the notice of funding opportunity here.

Observing Systems, Data, and Modeling

  • Since 2018, the U.S. Navy has provided gliders to NOAA for the hurricane season. This year the NOAA-Navy hurricane glider partnership expanded significantly in two ways! (1) Four U.S. Navy gliders will be provided to PacIOOS to fly in Hawaiian and Guam waters. (2) The U.S. Navy will also provide NOAA with ~10-15 profiling floats. GOMO/CHAOS will lead the deployment of the profiling floats.

  • Forecasts from JISAO’s Seasonal Coastal Ocean Prediction of the Ecosystem (J-SCOPE) are now available on Amazon Web Service’s Registry of Open Data as part of NOAA’s Open Data Dissemination (NODD) Program! J-SCOPE provides experimental seasonal forecasts (six to nine months) of upper ocean properties, based on operational simulations by NOAA's Climate Forecast System (CFS) model, and dynamical downscaling with a high-resolution version of the Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) that includes a state-of-the-art biogeochemical module. 

  • NANOOS is proud to announce that the newest oceanographic HF-radar installation at Kalaloch, WA, is operational and data are viewable from NVS as well as the IOOS HFRNet. This and the Westport, WA, HFR, just to the south, both installed by Matthew Srouffe with the lab of Dr. Mike Kosro at Oregon State University, were part of a “Fill the Gaps” campaign that IOOS initiated several years ago. We are so pleased to have these data for the local fishing season, search and rescue, HAB tracking, and other applications.

  • A new 13 MHz CODAR SeaSonde® “SOB2” on Martha’s Vineyard installed by NERACOOS member WHOI has been added to the IOOS HFR National Network! The Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory’s (MVCO) Shore Site, destroyed by the Northeast winter storms of 2023–2024, is again operational. Adding to the 5 and 16 MHz systems operating regionally, this site increases coverage and data resiliency of the Northeast Shelf, providing surface current velocity measurement coverage in the Atlantic, and is being evaluated for its capability to measure wave height, period, and direction as well.

  • SECOORA member University of South Florida has returned a WERA HF-radar in Venice, Florida to operations! This site was temporarily shut down due to hurricane damage and construction in 2024, and data delivery to the IOOS HFRNet resumed this March. With this WERA, NOAA IOOS near-live surface current data now covers over 45,000 km² (~17,400 sq. miles) of West Florida Shelf waters, from Clearwater to the Everglades, for use by fishermen and other boaters to safely navigate these coastal Florida waters. Direct specific questions to Dr. Clifford Merz at cmerz@usf.edu.

  • The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), along with Scripps Institution of Oceanography Coastal Observing Research & Development Center (CORDC) and the U.S. IOOS Office, has completed a project to retrieve and archive historical HF-radar radials here and total vector data files here from the former CORDC data repository server to fill gaps in NCEI’s IOOS oceanographic HF-radar data holdings. All HF-radar data files from CORDC have been successfully archived at NCEI, who now have archival data covering the entire history of the IOOS HF-radar program!

  • South Michigan Spotter buoy SPOT-31964C captured some impressive mid-lake weather as a large extratropical winter cyclone passed through the region on March 16th, riding waves topping 17 feet churned by 50mph wind speeds along the lake. The storm was observed as part of Michigan Tech's winter/year-round observing project, which maintains Spotter buoys across Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior when other platforms are recovered to protect them from ice and harsh conditions. These winter buoys help observe and document the lake environments at their most extreme

  • The Tanapag wave buoy off Saipan has been redeployed and is measuring wave height, direction, and energy, critical information for boats using Tanapag Harbor. Mahalo to our CNMI partners at Pacific Coastal Research and Planning, and Captain Cecilio with the Lucky Harvest. The Tanapag wave buoy is owned and managed by PacIOOS, and long-term partnerships between PacIOOS, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Coastal Data Information Program (CDIP) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography enable data streaming into the PacIOOS website and PacIOOS Voyager.

  • Two new coastal web cameras have been installed in the CeNCOOS Region at Santa Cruz Wharf and Stinson Beach! They are a part of WebCOOS, a national coastal web camera initiative led by SECOORA, and provide real-time views of coastal conditions to support monitoring of shoreline change and flooding.

  • NANOOS announces a new tool on NVS that visualizes model output conditions throughout the water column along a path (transect). Choose a model (LiveOcean or OSU ROMS), then users can select an existing Transect or create their own by clicking the "New Transect" button at the top of the "Transects" panel then clicking on the map to add points. Double-click to add the last point. Then select the variable and day/time of interest. Log in to save the Transect, which can be edited (change locations, name, color). Use the "Divider" function to expand the surface layer resolution.

  • Just in time for Summer, GCOOS has completed the migration of their All Things Beaches app into the GCOOS ArcGIS Online. The interactive maps on All Things Beaches allow visitors to explore beaches across the Gulf, including those that are regularly monitored and tested for water quality in coastal Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and on Florida's west coast. The guide also includes local links to beach information, including hours, parking, restrooms, showers, accessibility and other amenities.

  • The quarterly U.S. ATN Acoustic Telemetry Node Managers meeting was held virtually on April 2, 2026. The meeting was coordinated and led by ATN Interim Coordinator Ryan Logan. The goal of the meeting was to update on ATN developments, advance the discussion around the standardization of data policies and user agreements across all nodes, understand node cyberinfrastructure use, and exchange information about node meetings and other upcoming engagement opportunities.

  • The IOOS IRA Water Level Workshop took place in Denver, CO from April 13-16th. The workshop brought participants from RAs, the Program Office, GMRI, CO-OPS, and TetraTech together for interactive sessions focused on data interoperability, a coordinated metadata schema and tool, standard naming conventions, data pipelines into regional and national products and services, and standard operating procedures. The workshop helped foster a shared understanding of the current progress and future direction as we coordinate a national scale water level effort across IOOS.

  • The first of three workshops relating to Ecological Observations was held on April 21 - 23 and focused on plankton data user needs and data management solutions. Many participants were focused on HABs, and acknowledged in the discussion that broader management relevance (e.g., fisheries, protected species, Marine Protected Area use and management) is important for IOOS RAs to capture in future plankton-related efforts. There was a lively discussion about the data flow for IOOS plankton data, with plans to continue these conversations at the Annual DMAC Meeting June 2 - 4.

IOOS Enterprise

  • PacIOOS has been recertified as a Regional Coastal Observing System. RCOS certification is a system-wide requirement of the ICOOS Act and verifies that a Regional Association meets federal standards for data gathering and management. It lasts five years, at which point it must be renewed.

  • NOAA Fisheries Cooperative Research Summit in April brought scientists and fishermen together to actively build research partnerships. This year, the event spotlighted NERACOOS’ Mariner’s Dashboard during a session demonstrating environmental data portals designed for fishermen.

  • CO-OPS’ Coastal Inundation Dashboard now features imagery from 23 new coastal webcams! These webcams are part of the Webcam Coastal Observation System (WebCOOS), which is sponsored by the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA).

  • StartBlue applications for the 2026 Fall Program are now open! Ocean intelligence startups can join Launch (early-stage) or Scale (later-stage) tracks. The deadline to apply is June 21. Information sessions are May 1, May 27, and June 12. https://startblue.ucsd.edu/program/

  • Great Lakes Innovation Accelerator is accepting applications for its Summer 2026 program! Gener8tor runs this nondilutive, 12-week accelerator three times a year for pre and seed startup founders in the fresh water industry looking to make an impact in the Great Lakes region. The program will run from August 31 - November 20. Applications are due by May 31!

  • CeNCOOS has released a new Strategic & Implementation Plan for 2026 - 2030, reaffirming their commitment to delivering high-quality ocean and coastal data and information that supports better decision-making across California and beyond.

  • The U.S. continues to close mapping gaps on ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes waters. In 2025, the ocean and coastal mapping community added 70,700 square nautical miles of new bathymetric data coverage to national repositories. Read more here.

Partners

  • The U.S. National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) offers a collection of Community Datasets combining data from multiple sources, applying additional processing and quality control, or building curated collections tailored to specific scientific questions.

New Papers and Reports

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