Recommendations

Building on top of positive feedback from the user community on Arvor/Provor floats, the primary recommendations from the workshop are:

  1. To improve and facilitate communication within the Argo community on all technical issues (eg: floats failure modes, ongoing sensor and float problems to be solved, recommended standard configurations, etc...). The Arvor/Provor float users could potentially build upon the Euro-Argo Collaborative Framework and keep organizing recurrent workshops;
  2. To share pre-deployment procedures among Arvor-Provor users for:
    • In house facilities or on dock before departure:
      • For float configuration (eg: macros defining standard missions, NKE mission design GUI)
      • Post-delivery checklist (eg: Iridium tests, battery tests, sensor tests, etc…)
    • At sea:
      • Deployment checklist (1 page sheet)
  3. The Arvor/Provor user community recommends that sensor manufacturers develop sensor self-testing capabilities that would be incorporated into the already existing auto-testing feature of the Arvor/Provor floats.
  4. The Arvor/Provor user community recommends float and sensor manufacturers to provide central entry points (and machine-to-machine readable) for:
    • best practices checklists for their floats or sensors,
    • meta-data access on floats or sensors with as many technical details as possible (eg: about pre-calibration, sub-component information),
    • technical vocabulary definitions in line with those of the Argo data management team
  5. To continuously develop and improve online fleet monitoring tools like https://fleetmonitoring.euro-argo.eu (eg: to include more information on sensor performance).
  6. The user community requests that NKE extend the mission planning tool APMT Profiler GUI (dedicated to the Provor CTS5) to the Arvor. This tool allows the user to design a configuration and receive information about the expected lifetime of the float, data telemetry estimates, etc., as a function of sensor payload and cycle configurations.
  7. To improve recovery methods of floats. This workshop resulted in the creation of a working group on this topic at https://github.com/euroargodev/recovery.

By the organizing committee: