Seacoos Program Management

The management of the SEACOOS program and its evolution over a five-year period are reviewed. The topics included pertain to the mechanisms used to create a consortium, define its mission, develop and manage its annual budget and tasking cycle; and the history of its focus over a five-year period. The management of SEACOOS was complex and required significant efforts to develop new approaches and collaborative mechanisms. Changes in management were made as weaknesses were identified and to enable a more unified approach to the evaluation, operations, data management and outreach efforts. A number of programmatic lessons learned are summarized that may be of value for future development of regional coastal ocean observing systems