OceanHackWeek (OHW) 2022 concluded on August 19th after five days of collaborative data exploration, peer learning, and software development. Expanding on a successful hybrid event in 2021, OHW22 was a global virtual event with six regional satellites around the world to accommodate more diverse learning environment preferences, as well as to better address the demand for in-person engagement, and support a larger number of participants. 104 participants from multiple countries gathered online and in coordinated satellite events around the globe: the Northeast, Southwest, and Northwest regions of the United States; Australia; Brazil (in Portuguese); and a Spanish language virtual group. The global event spanned time zones from Hawaii to Poland. Participants were joined by many organizers, instructors, project mentors, and other helpers. Tutorials and projects included oceanographic sub-disciplines (searching for passive acoustic data to unsupervised clustering of flow cytometry data), data sources (remote sensing, ocean and climate models, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, US IOOS, and OBIS) and open-source programming languages (Python and R), which were all supported by a common computational infrastructure on the cloud and coordination that enabled extensive project collaborations across the satellites.

Feedback from an OHW22 participant sums up their overall experience: “Participating in OceanHackWeek was a great privilege…. I was able to meet and talk to people from different countries who work in the area of Oceanography and are developing tools and routines to optimize their work and research,” said Paula Marangoni, a Ph.D. student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. “I learned a lot of new things with the projects and I was also able to improve my skills in areas that I was already working on, such as data analysis in Python.”

Presentations, tutorials, and project presentations are openly accessible from the OHW website as computational notebooks, slides, and video recordings on YouTube. The event was co-led by organizers from many institutions in multiple countries, including Wu-Jung Lee and Emilio Mayorga from the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. General funding was provided by NASA, US Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), and NSF. Support for the Northwest satellite was provided by the UW Applied Physics Laboratory, the eScience Institute, and the UW School of Oceanography. Learn more about the OceanHackWeek program here.