APROPOS Workshop Report
The Future of Physical Oceanography
Report of the APROPOS Workshop
Monterey, California
December 15-17, 1997
Sponsored by the
National Science Foundation
Division of Ocean Sciences
DRAFT #5, 15 October 1998
Table of ContentsII. The past twenty years of physical oceanography
IV. Intradiscipline interactions
V. Interfaces with other disciplines
VII. The NSF's physical oceanography Core program
VIII. The infrastructure of physical oceanography
** Thematic Presentations and Responses **
(14 Dec. 98)
The community was asked to consider advances in physical oceanography over the last twenty years. The following items were widely hailed as significant recent achievements: a revolutionary understanding of the coupling of the tropical ocean and atmosphere, and the development of predictive El Niño models; estimation of the global distribution of mesoscale variability in the world ocean and theories and models of this geostrophic turbulence; completion of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment and improved estimates of the pathways and timescales of the circulation; quantitative measurements of the strength of small-scale ocean mixing and the dependence of this mixing on the strength of the internal wave field and other environmental conditions.
The community was also asked to look into the future and forecast advances for the next twenty years. Great excitement was expressed at the prospect of new tools which might solve the problem of observing the global ocean. Already the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite mission has measured the topography of the sea surface to 3 cm accuracy at 7 km spacing for 5 years. Future developments in satellite oceanography promise global measurements of sea surface salinity and precipitation. These measurements are crucial if we are to understand the climate system and the hydrologic cycle. Yet sea-truth is essential and in situ water-column observations made by an unprecedented class of autonomous instruments are anticipated. Integrating measurements, such as tomography, and the installation of cheap and easy-to-use probes on ships-of-opportunity, hold great promise.
Even with present technology, a description and an understanding of the spatial distribution of turbulent processes in the global ocean is achievable in the next decade. Our present conception of ocean dynamics is largely ignorant of processes with relatively short horizontal length scales (say 100m to 50 km). Yet biological variability is concentrated on these short scales. It is the dynamics on these same scales that is parameterized by eddy resolving circulation models. Further, in the coastal zones, cross-shelf exchanges are likely mediated by instabilities and topographic influences whose horizontal scales are much less than those of the well-studied alongshore flows. Exploring these largely unvisited scales is a new frontier for physical oceanography.
Several problems facing physical oceanography were identified at the meeting. These are: (i) large sea-going groups are retrenching and there is a consequent loss of technicians, engineers and the hardware that these people maintain; (ii) sustaining the funding of long time series observations is difficult; (iii) physical oceanography is not visible to undergraduate mathematics, physics and engineering majors, and so does not attract many graduate applicants from that population; (iv) the organization of the NSF's Ocean Sciences program makes it difficult to fund projects of intermediate size, and this difficulty is compounded if the project is interdisciplinary.
Despite these problems, there was consensus that the National Science Foundation's Core program is an invaluable asset of the field. The peer review system maintains a balance between scientific rigor and responsiveness and ensures continuing support for innovative and fundamental science.
1. What is physical oceanography?
2. What are the most significant accomplishments in physical oceanography over the past two decades?
3. What are the current and emerging scientific questions in physical oceanography that we might expect to answer in 10 or 20 years?
4. What are the unique and successful aspects of NSF core research?
5. Are the interactions among the elements of PO (analytical, experimental, numerical and observational) adequate?
6. Will interactions with atmospheric sciences, biology, chemistry and geology be a driving force on core PO? If so how?
7. What are the interactions and balance between the core physical oceanography program and large programs? How should they evolve in the future?
8. How do advances in PO benefit other parts of ocean sciences?
9. What pressing societal problems can PO contribute to?
10. What infrastructure (e.g., ships, instrumentation, computers, people) will be required to answer these questions?
By November 1997, there were about fifty replies posted on the APROPOS homepage2 and replies continued to arrive until February 1998. This meeting report synthesizes those replies together with the results of the group discussion at the retreat. Each of the four discussion groups was assigned focus questions from the list above and each group was asked to produce a synthetic essay in answer to its focus questions. All groups were asked to consider the two "big questions", questions 2 and 3 on the list above.
Another component of the meeting was six thematic presentations and six responses addressed to the assembled participants. The goal of these talks, organized mainly in terms of scientific methodology, was to direct the attention of the participants to concrete scientific issues. The presentations were given by specialists, while the respondents were chosen as educated observers of the specialist's subject. The speakers and respondents were:
INSTRUMENTATION FOR PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY: Charles Eriksen, with Jack Barth responding.
RESEARCH DISCOVERIES FROM THE OPEN OCEAN: John Toole, with Rui Xin Huang responding.
TRENDS IN NUMERICAL MODELING FOR PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY: Jim McWilliams, with Jim Moum responding.
OBSERVATIONAL COASTAL OCEANOGRAPHY: Ken Brink, with Parker MacCready responding.
THE ROLE OF LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS IN PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY: Tony Maxworthy, with Roger Samelson responding.
The talks and responses were followed by wide-ranging plenary discussion. After these plenary sessions, the discussion groups formed to consider the implications of the thematic talks for the ten questions posed above.
II. The past twenty years of physical oceanography
The last twenty years have seen great advances in our physical understanding of the oceans. Each of these advances is a small piece in a gigantic puzzle. In the last two decades we have found important new pieces, and strengthened our grip on many of the old. The field is just beginning to assemble these elements and uncover the great picture that is our ultimate scientific goal: a comprehensive understanding of the physics of the ocean. In this section we summarize some highpoints of physical oceanography since the 1970's.
III. Future directions
Challenging as it may be to make progress on any scientific problem, it is even more difficult to predict the future course of scientific progress. One might say that every important discovery in science is, almost by definition, unpredictable and so it is futile to guess at future triumphs. Indeed, it is worse than futile if these guesses are used to"manage" the direction and content of science. It is our belief that basic research, independent of any practical concerns, is critical to the advance of science and the development of technology. Science is the most serendipitous of human enterprises and the ability of physical oceanography to solve problems of social concern depends on a healthy commitment of resources to basic research on fundamental scientific issues.
The development of long-term forecasting skill raises challenging scientific problems. These include: understanding and quantifying turbulent mixing, convection, water-mass formation and destruction; the thermohaline circulation and its coupling to the wind-driven circulation; the generation, maintenance, and destruction of climatic anomalies; climatic oscillations and the extratropical coupling of the ocean and atmosphere on seasonal, decadal and interdecadal timescales; the physics of exchange processes between the ocean and the atmosphere. All these problems are of fundamental scientific and practical importance.
Will there be substantial progress on these issues during the next decade? Many physical oceanographers have already begun an enthusiastic frontal assault under the banner of CLIVAR. It is likely that the economic issues which surround global change and climate prediction will motivate continued financial support from society. If people and money are what counts, then we have every reason to be optimistic.
The problem of global climate prediction is the most difficult that our field has encountered. Unlike equatorial oceanography and El Niño, there is not going to be a theory based on linear waveguide dynamics which decisively identifies timescales and cohesively binds oceanography and meteorology. Further, the decadal timescale of extratropical dynamics means that scientists see only a few realizations of the system within their own lifetime. This is bad for morale, but even worse, we cannot wait to gather enough data to reliably verify the different predictions of climate models. Could meteorologists have developed daily weather prediction models if these scientists saw only three or four independent realizations of the system in a lifetime? The only way around this statistical problem is to expand our data base and frame hypotheses about past climate change and ocean circulation using paleo-oceanographic studies. An important challenge is to test the dynamical consistency of these hypotheses.
Coupled with improved estimates of the freshwater sources at the surface, will be an increased understanding of water-mass dynamics and transformations. We can look for advancement on such fundamental issues as the causes of the temperature-salinity relationship, thermocline maintenance and interhemispheric water-mass exchanges.
A national effort to support sustained high-quality global observations over decades is needed. Measurements of air-sea fluxes of heat, fresh water, and gases, of surface and sub-surface temperature, salinity and velocity, are all necessary to meet new scientific challenges and practical needs. Looking beyond the equatorial TOGA-TAO array, long-term subsurface measurements spanning the global ocean are required.
Given the rapid increase in Lagrangian measurements by drifting and profiling floats, and the parallel increase in geochemical tracer data, an intense approach to Lagrangian analysis of advection and diffusion is warranted; our existing base of theoretical tools and concepts is not worthy of the observations which we are about to receive.
In addition to cross-shelf exchange processes themselves, there is the question of how the coastal ocean couples to its surroundings on both the landward and seaward sides. Estuarine processes are important for determining the quantity and quality of terrestrial materials that reach the open shelves. The oceanic setting, including eddies, filaments and boundary currents, in turn determines how effectively coastal influences can spread offshore, or how the oceanic reservoir will affect shelf conditions. Consequently, the study of the continental shelf demands consideration of both offshore and near-shore (estuarine and surf zone) dynamics.
Lakes can be useful analogs of the ocean, with wind and thermally driven circulations, developing coastal fronts, and topographically steered currents. Lakes are important as model ecosystems which are simpler and more accessible than ocean ecosystems. Significant progress can be foreseen in the coming decades in limnology, helped by the tools and ideas developed for the ocean.
The expertise of the physical oceanography community should make possible substantial advances in the understanding of all these shallow systems. Because of the major roles played by turbulence and complex topography, these systems pose impressive and fascinating challenges to physical oceanography.
Knowledge of the horizontal structure of the ocean on scales between the mesoscale (roughly 50 km) and the microscale (roughly less than 10 m) will be radically advanced and altered. The growing use of towed and autonomous vehicles, in combination with acoustic Doppler current profilers, will revolutionize our view of the ocean by exploring and mapping these almost unvisited scales throughout the global ocean. While this research is driven by interdisciplinary forces (biological processes and variability are active on these relatively small horizontal scales) it is also a new frontier for physical oceanography, and one in which even present technology enables ocean observers to obtain impressive data sets.
We now have a well-acknowledged list of subregions of general circulation models that are greatly in need of improvement. These include: deep convection; boundary currents and benthic boundary layers; the representation of the dynamics and thermohaline variability of the upper mixed layer; fluxes across the air-sea interface; diapycnal mixing; topographic effects. Progress in all of these areas is likely as our capacity for modeling smaller scale features increases, and as physically -based parameterizations are developed.
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IV. Intradiscipline interactions3
NSF should support activities promoting interactions among theorists, modelers and observers. Good communication within physical oceanography is important for nurturing and exchanging new ideas, and it also provides collaborative opportunities for testing new ideas by combining observations and theory. The Internet has made a great difference in the way we communicate, and full motion video will enable close collaborations to develop at a distance. Yet, personal interactions will remain crucial. There will continue to be a need for workshops which bring oceanographers from different institutions and areas of expertise together for extended periods. It is also important that there be the opportunity for investigators to make extended visits to institutions other than their own, and meet others with similar interests, but different approaches.
The responses of the physical oceanography community to the question: "Are the interactions among the elements of PO (analytic, experimental, numerical and observational) adequate?" indicate a mild level of discontent with the present level of interaction between modelers and observers. The barriers to communication are much lower than they were ten years ago, and the WOCE program deserves some of credit for this improvement (especially in the field of data assimilation).
The community response also indicates a lack of interaction between "process-study" modelers (those undertaking focused computations intended to expose a deliberately limited amount of physics) and "comprehensive" modelers (all-inclusive computations intended to realistically simulate a complex system). In particular, there seems to be a regrettable intellectual prejudice against the latter. Physical oceanography is maturing to the stage where it is beginning to recognize that large simulations, like observations, provide a test bed for process studies and theories.
(i) Creation of a web-based directory of research interests of scientists.
(ii) General Circulation Modelers should be encouraged to provide the results of their simulations to the community in a manageable form.
(iii) NSF-sponsored summer schools, workshops and post-doctoral programs to encourage cross-fertilization between the different methodologies.
(iv) Encouragement of proposals using complementary approaches (observations, modeling, laboratory, theory).
V. Interfaces with other disciplines4
As oceanography progresses, it becomes increasingly advantageous, indeed necessary, to formulate new research initiatives using an interdisciplinary framework. There are many examples: one can no longer study the food chain without understanding circulation and mixing processes; in certain conditions phytoplankton play a significant role in the upper ocean heat balance; the ocean bottom not only steers currents, there is growing evidence that currents may also shape the bottom on geological time scales; paleoclimatology draws much insight from biology, chemistry and physics. In short, we can anticipate and should facilitate closer ties and collaboration across the entire science of oceanography. There is true synergy to be found here.
Not all interactions between disciplines are interdisciplinary research. The latter is characterized by a two-way flow of information between the sciences involved. This exchange may be simpler and more apparent when the sciences share a common physical basis, such as the collaboration between physical oceanography and meteorology in the study of air-sea fluxes. Alternatively, interactions may take the form of shared ideas and knowledge in an attack on a common problem, such as the physics and biology of coastal upwelling systems. Studies that involve a one-way flow of information, such as the importation of inverse theory from geophysics into physical oceanography, are of great value, but are not interdisciplinary research. Three elements are identified as keys to successful interdisciplinary research projects:
There was agreement at the APROPOS meeting that if physical oceanography is reduced to the service role of making routine measurements of environmental variables then the project is not interdisciplinary, though it may be excellent science. Despite this unanimity, there was significant disagreement over how strictly (ii) should be interpreted: some projects acquire strength by addressing issues which fall between traditional divisions. In these cases imaginative physical oceanographers will see opportunities even though the immediate physical content of the project may not be at the forefront of our science.
An increase in interdisciplinary research poses challenges for the research, educational and funding institutions. Physical oceanographic departments have an opportunity to participate in and guide the development of interdisciplinary projects. A structural obstacle to this involvement is the tendency of some departments to undervalue contributions to interdisciplinary research in promotion decisions. If physical oceanography departments fail to appreciate people who cross traditional boundaries then exciting scientific opportunities will be lost.
As we train new graduate students in physical oceanography, we should prepare them for an interdisciplinary research environment by including more than a cursory exposure to ocean research activities outside physical oceanography. However, this must not be at the expense of a solid grounding in the physical and mathematical fundamentals of physical oceanography. An increasing number of departments is already moving towards interdisciplinary research and including significant meteorological, chemical, biological or geophysical components in their students' education. As in the case of research, if physical oceanography curricula cannot accommodate interdisciplinary education then many students may opt for explicitly interdisciplinary curricula.
The funding of proposals that cross the disciplinary boundaries on which the NSF is organized poses a challenge to the NSF. The existing system has produced good examples of interdisciplinary research in the last 20 years. These include impressive progress in the understanding of El Niño, and the use of geochemical tracers to illuminate ocean dynamics. However, the current practice of having interdisciplinary proposals go through the review process of two or more panels and be assigned funding from two or more separate disciplinary pools of money continues to produce difficulties. There is not a consensus on how to solve this problem.
VI. Interfaces with society5
The world ocean has a major impact on a host of societal issues. The 1992 National Research Council report on "Oceanography in the Next Decade" begins its executive summary with an unequivocal acknowledgment of this fact:
Every problem or issue that requires knowledge of water motion, or the transport of materials or physical properties by water motion, relies on physical oceanography. Such problems include: pollutant dispersal and remediation, transport of anthropogenic and natural materials, climate change, air-sea rescue, wave and surge prediction and the prediction and nowcasting of currents and water levels in coastal areas, bays, and harbors, fishery management, and eventually all enterprises which require knowledge of sea surface temperature, including coastal habitability, species abundance, global warming, sea level rise, and the prediction of hurricane tracks and intensities. Every human activity in the ocean, and many human activities in the adjacent coastal zone and far inland (as the effect of El Nino weather anomalies on agricultural productivity has dramatically demonstrated), is affected by physical oceanographic phenomena.
In the following sections, we enumerate some of the main areas in which physical oceanography has an impact on issues of social concern, and then outline emerging scientific challenges in some of these areas. But first, four general points deserve emphasis:
(ii) Applied physical oceanography in support of socio-economic planning and regulatory activities will inevitably become more significant as we move closer to the limits of sustainable use of the environment.
(iii) While the study of the oceans is motivated by societal needs, our ability to meet such needs through applied research depends critically on the expertise we develop through basic research that addresses fundamental scientific questions. The discussion of these concerns at the APROPOS meeting did not, however, come to terms with the issue of how to connect basic science to practical usage. Such transitions require establishment of links with scientists who are dealing with environmental problems, perhaps at the level of local government.
(iv)In societal applications, physical oceanography is most useful when it acts in alliance with other disciplines.
We now turn to some specific connections between social concerns and physical oceanography.
VII. The NSF's Physical Oceanography Core program6
The National Science Foundation's Core program, in philosophy and practice, is an invaluable asset to physical oceanography. The history of physical oceanography is replete with examples of essential concepts and ideas created by the lone investigator, supported by the Core program. In addition, large science, as embodied in programs such as WOCE, GLOBEC and CoOP, has often looked to and incorporated scientific principles whose genesis can be traced to Core research. The essential qualities of Core research are flexibility, innovation, responsiveness and diversity of investigator-driven research. The Core program has shown a remarkable capacity for recognizing and nurturing emerging trends. Often, these are ideas whose emergence is impossible to predict. The administration of Core research by dedicated and effective program managers, who oversee the peer review system, is responsible for maintaining a balance between scientific rigor and responsiveness. This system provides support for conservative and fundamental science, as well as fostering exciting new ideas. This flexibility must not be lost for Core to continue as a nursery of innovative physical oceanography. This role is increasingly important in order to mitigate the political and societal pressures that direct science toward applied and "relevant" research.
The NSF Core program plays an essential role in nurturing young scientists. The program provides a unique opportunity for a young scientist to win support for a fledgling research program, often in a completely novel direction, by appeal to established scientists with a well-conceived and executed proposal. This is a strenuous undertaking, and is unlikely to succeed without the support of a well-respected mentor, and a promising record as a graduate student and perhaps as a postdoctoral fellow. This is as it should be in a world that cannot divine the promise of an individual in a vacuum. Still, Core provides one of the best paths for young scientists to become independent investigators in physical oceanography.
The nature of Core-related work necessarily involves an unpredictable side, reminiscent of the character of nonlinear dynamical systems. The flexibility of the Core program must be preserved, in order to provide opportunities for bold and unexpected advances in our science.
There are benefits of the proposal review process that go beyond the necessary function of competitive evaluation and selection. The scientific ideas and approaches must be more clearly defined than in any other funding environment, leading to research programs of the highest quality. The thoughtful and rigorous review process can help reshape a rejected proposal into a successful future research endeavor. Moreover, the experiences of reviewing proposals and serving on panels broadens the awareness of researchers about other efforts in the field and about the funding process itself. Although these aspects of the peer review process are taxing to the community, they provide invaluable insights into the emerging ideas and priorities of other members of the research community. Serving on a panel also tends to reinstill one's faith in the effectiveness of the peer-review process, and serving on an NSF panel is an excellent experience for young scientists.
The organization of ocean sciences at the NSF makes it difficult to fund projects of intermediate size. (Roughly speaking, these are projects with an annual budget of about $1 million to $2 million.) The logistical hurdles involved with the design and implementation of such a project are formidable. Because of this effort, the cost of failure in the proposal review process is significant. Yet the high cost of such proposals makes them difficult to support within core research. In many cases these intermediate-sized projects are interdisciplinary, so they require the involvement of more than one NSF program. The NSF should continue to be aware of these problems, and should establish guidelines for the initiation of both intermediate size projects and interdisciplinary programs. With these guidelines, and knowledge of budgetary constraints, program managers should be able to advise scientists about the prospects for funding of a project. If an idea seems viable, then the NSF should be able to advise on the submission and review process and, in the case of interdisciplinary proposals, establish a special review process.
Interdisciplinary programs are a particular problem in that their strength is often in the issues that lie between two disciplines, rather than in innovative science in each individual discipline. Being subject to the same standards within each discipline as single-discipline proposals will result in the rejection of interdisciplinary proposals. This problem will be ameliorated as more oceanographers become involved with interdisciplinary research but, at this time, special efforts need to be made to evaluate interdisciplinary proposals.
Large groups dedicated to the application of cutting-edge computational methods to the prediction of climate may emerge, as has occurred in meteorology. As concerns about the ecological health of our planet grow, we are pressed ever more for answers to global questions; large programs will provide the focus that is necessary to address these matters.
Most large programs have roots in Core, including one of the most prominent successes in physical oceanography - the TOGA program and the associated advances in our understanding of El Niño and its influence on global climate. Core-supported research in equatorial dynamics provided the groundwork for this large-scale research effort, without which the critical importance of the equatorial atmosphere-ocean coupling would not have been recognized. An equally successful interaction is the study of the coastal upwelling systems of eastern boundary currents. Core funding supported the development of ideas and techniques, later used in the larger programs, and also spawned related spin-offs such as new observations and continued analysis. The larger programs incorporated results from Core projects into a coordinated and interdisciplinary examination of coastal upwelling on a scale not possible within Core. Additional examples include the Subduction experiment and the recent Tracer Release experiments, whose founding ideas and principles germinated in Core sponsored research but whose execution required the support of a large NSF or ONR program. Core also provided support for ideas generated during, but not included in, the large programs. Indeed, so many scientists receive support from a shifting mixture of Core and large programs that it is impossible to assign credit for particular achievements. Finally, the international collaborations initiated by large programs have contributed to the development of oceanographic capabilities in other countries and these collaborations are essential to the success of research projects with global scope.
VIII. The infrastructure of physical oceanography
Based on the present challenges and future demands of research in physical oceanography, we make several recommendations about the infrastructure of our science.
In the future, increased use of autonomous underwater vehicles and remote operating vehicles will change ship requirements but these technologies will not likely significantly reduce our reliance on ships. Ships of opportunity and volunteer observing ships are likely to be used more frequently as we attempt to obtain long term data sets from the global ocean. A need will exist for the implementation and coordination of this sampling with other programs such as satellite measurements, moorings, floats, drifters and long time series at fixed locations. Sensor packages of varying complexity must be developed, tested, refined and manufactured and partnerships must be forged with the merchant fleet. Long term support has to be garnered for the implementation of a major global ocean sampling program using a mixture of sea-going and remote sensing platforms.
Large sea-going groups have been dealing with retrenchment for several years; some APROPOS participants and respondents used terms such as "death" and "crisis" to describe the current state. This situation is a result of the contraction of the ONR, which formerly provided stable funding to support the skilled technicians who are essential in sea-going enterprises. Once physical oceanography loses these people, a large investment in hardware is gone with them. Managing this contraction, so that physical oceanography maintains critical nuclei of sea-going expertise, is a major problem.
The ideal applicant to a graduate physical oceanography program is a mathematics, physics or engineering major. Yet physical oceanography has little visibility to the undergraduates in those majors. The NSF might consider developing a program which will increase the awareness of physical oceanography as a career option for technically trained undergraduates.
There must be sufficient scientists to meet the demands and sufficient funds to maintain the health of the science. The times are changing. The explosive growth of science since the creation of the NSF, and since the technology race of the cold war, is now over. Determining the future demands for personnel in our field is nearly impossible, but anticipation of modest growth is reasonable. The time required to produce a graduate means that one must expect demand for that student five or more years in it the future. We remain optimistic that opportunities for our students will be there, but we do not envision expansion at double digit rates.
Several APROPOS participants commented that physical oceanography graduate students are very aware of the severe difficulties facing sea-going groups (see People above). Students are responding by avoiding thesis work with a large sea-going component. The long-term consequences of this trend will be to take physical oceanography away from its roots in field observations.
We need to have an understanding of past and present rates of Ph.D. production in ocean sciences. The NSF should monitor the number of Ph.D. students being produced in each subdiscipline of physical oceanography. The NSF has great power to control that production by its response to requests for student and post-doctoral support in proposals, and by the management of fellowship programs. Progress in physical oceanography is still dependent to a large extent on innovative ways of observing the ocean. Today, with the high cost and logistical effort associated with sea going programs, more students busy themselves in front of computer screens. We must assure that a steady supply of experimenters and engineers continues along with modelers and theoreticians. A delicate balance must be maintained.
Environmental problems will increase in the next decades and increased public concern will continue to provide opportunities with the greening of undergraduate education. Science, including physical oceanography, will become a key player in an arena where economics, law, engineering, and medicine are all active. Our future graduates should have increased opportunities for interdisciplinary studies both inside of and outside of the academic science community. If the world is survival-oriented, then resources will become available for this work. However, great conflict exists regarding the education of these future scientists. We are torn between assuring that our students know a lot about very little or very little about a lot. No solution is offered here. We encourage the NSF to consider the overlapping activities of general science education, undergraduate education and graduate education with ocean research and environmental applications.
3 This was the focus issue for group consisting of Bower, Boyd, Chassignet, Doney, Eriksen, Hara, Johnson, Moum, Muenchow, Price, and Rizzoli.
Here are some suggestions for improving communications:
4 This is the focus issue for the group consisting of Barth, Brink, MacCready, Maxworthy, McWilliams, Meacham, Roemmich, Schlosser, Thompson, and Toole.
(i) Each of the disciplines relevant to the problem must be involved, from the outset, in the planning of the project.
(ii) The planning process must ensure that the project, as a whole, is recognizable as cutting edge research by the disciplines involved.
(iii) There must be a compatibility of spatial and temporal scales between the components of the work that pertain to the different disciplines involved.
5 This is the focus issue for the group consisting of Friedrichs, Gordon, Huang, Kawase, Lozier, Luther, Maslowski, Monismith, Rudnick, Samelson, and Tandon.
"The ocean dominates Earth's surface and greatly affects daily life. It regulates Earth's climate, plays a critical role in the hydrological cycle, sustains a large portion of Earth's biodiversity, supplies food and mineral resources, constitutes an important medium of national defense, provides an inexpensive means of transportation, is the final destination of many waste products, is a major location of human recreation, and inspires our aesthetic nature."
(i) Many of these problems (such as pollutant transport and fishery management) have historically been regarded as regional issues, but now require a global perspective.
6 This is the focus issue for the group consisting of Chang, Dewar, Geyer, Leaman, Melville, Qiu, Ralph, Ledwell, Rhines, Rossby, Strub, and Van Scoy.
| J. Barth^, OSU | A. Bower, WHOI | J. Boyd, UMich |
| K. Brink, WHOI | P. Chang, TAMU | E. Chassignet^, RSMAS |
| W. Dewar, FSU | S. Doney, NCAR | C. Eriksen, UW |
| C. Freidrichs, VIMS | R. Geyer, WHOI | A. Gordon, LDEO |
| R.X. Huang, WHOI | T. Hara, URI | M. Johnson, UAlaska |
| M. Kawase, UW | K. Leaman, RSMAS | J. Ledwell^, WHOI |
| S. Lozier^, Duke | D. Luther, UH | W. Maslowski, NPS |
| T. Maxworthy, USC | P. McCready, UW | J. McWiliams, UCLA |
| S. Meacham, MIT | K. Melville, SIO | S. Monismith^, Stanford |
| J. Moum, OSU | A. Muenchow, Rutgers | J. Price, WHOI |
| E. Ralph, UMinn | P. Rhines^, UW | P. Rizzoli, MIT |
| B. Qiu, UH | D. Roemmich, SIO | T. Rossby, URI |
| T. Royer^, ODU | D. Rudnick, SIO | R. Samelson, OSU |
| P. Schlosser^, LDEO | T. Straub, OSU | A. Tandon, UCSC |
| L. Thompson, UW | J. Toole, WHOI | K. van Scoy, UWisconsin |
| W. Young^, SIO |
^ = steering committee member
For further information on the APROPOS Workshop, please contact Cathy Clark of UCAR-JOSS at apropos@joss.ucar.edu.
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