NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ATM-9316824. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Cover: Reproduction of an oil painting titled J's Landscape by Edith Paipert Namias. The artist studied at the Corcoran School of Art and the American University. Exhibitions of her work have appeared in the Smithsonian, the Corcoran Biennial Exhibit, the Baltimore Museum, the University of Virginia, the George Washington University, and the National Collection of Paintings, among many others. She is represented in several collections, including those of the Argentine Embassy and the Watkins Gallery of American University. Edith and her husband Jerry, an internationally recognized pioneer in the study of climate variability, reside in La Jolla, California.
CLIMATE RESEARCH COMMITTEE
ERIC J. BARRON (Chair),
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
DAVID S. BATTISTI,
University of Washington, Seattle
BYRON A. BOVILLE*,
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
KIRK BRYAN*,
NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey
GEORGE F. CARRIER*,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
ROBERT D. CESS*,
State University of New York, Stony Brook
RUSS E. DAVIS,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California
MELINDA M. HALL,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts
THOMAS R. KARL,
National Climatic Data Center. Asheville, North Carolina
JEFFREY T. KIEHL,
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
DOUGLAS G. MARTINSON*,
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, New York
CLAIRE L. PARKINSON,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Greenbelt, Maryland
BARRY SALTZMAN,
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
RICHARD P. TURCO,
University of California, Los Angeles
Ex Officio Members
EDWARD S. SARACHIK,
University of Washington, Seattle
SOROOSH SOROOSHIAN,
University of Arizona, Tucson
PETER J. WEBSTER,
University of Colorado, Boulder
Staff
WILLIAM A. SPRIGG, Director
KENT L. GRONINGER, Senior Program Officer
MARK D. HANDEL, Senior Program Officer
DORIS E. BOUADJEMI, Administrative Assistant
THERESA M. FISHER, Administrative Assistant
BOARD ON ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES AND CLIMATE
JOHN A. DUTTON (Chair),
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
CRAIG E. DORMAN, Consultant,
Arlington, Virginia
MICHAEL FOX-RABINOVITZ,
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
PETER V. HOBBS,
University of Washington, Seattle
WITOLD F. KRAJEWSKI,
The University of Iowa, Iowa City
MARGARET A. LeMONE,
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
DOUGLAS K. LILLY,
University of Oklahoma, Norman
RICHARD S. LINDZEN,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
GERALD R. NORTH,
Texas A&M University, College Station
EUGENE M. RASMUSSON,
University of Maryland, College Park
ROBERT J. SERAFIN,
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Ex Officio Members
ERIC J. BARRON,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
WILLIAM L. CHAMEIDES,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
MARVIN A. GELLER,
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Staff
WILLIAM A. SPRIGG, Director
KENT L. GRONINGER, Senior Program Officer
MARK D. HANDEL, Senior Program Officer
DAVID H. SLADE, Senior Program Officer
DORIS E. BOUADJEMI, Administrative Assistant
THERESA M. FISHER, Administrative Assistant
ELLEN F. RICE, Editor
COMMISSION ON GEOSCIENCES, ENVIRONMENT, AND RESOURCES
M. GORDON WOLMAN (Chair),
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
PATRICK R. ATKINS,
Aluminum Company of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
EDITH BROWN WEISS,
Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.
JAMES P. BRUCE,
Canadian Climate Program Board, Ottawa, Canada
WILLIAM L. FISHER,
University of Texas, Austin
EDWARD A. FRIEMAN,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California
GEORGE M. HORNBERGER,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
W. BARCLAY KAMB,
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
PERRY L. McCARTY,
Stanford University, California
RAYMOND A. PRICE,
Queen's University of Kingston, Ontario, Canada
THOMAS A. SCHELLING,
University of Maryland, College Park
ELLEN SILBERGELD,
Environmental Defense Fund, Washington, D.C.
STEVEN M. STANLEY,
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
VICTORIA J. TSCHINKEL,
Landers and Parsons, Tallahassee, Florida
WARREN WASHINGTON,
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Staff
STEPHEN RATTIEN, Executive Director
STEPHEN D. PARKER, Associate Executive Director
MORGAN GOPNIK, Assistant Executive Director
JEANETTE SPOON, Administrative Officer
SANDRA FITZPATRICK, Administrative Associate
ROBIN ALLEN, Senior Project Assistant
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Preface
The 10-year international Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program was a major element of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) with participation by the United States and many other countries. As TOGA approached its midpoint in 1989, two realizations with respect to the program had begun to emerge. The first was that, despite the remarkable progress already made, 10 years would not be long enough to achieve fully the objectives of TOGA's observational, modeling, and prediction components. The second realization was that climate variations on seasonal-to-interannual time scales seemed to be intimately linked with variations in extratropical sea-surface temperature (SST) and land-surface properties. This second realization cast attention on the possibility of acting on the achievements of TOGA to expand the area of inquiry beyond the tropical Pacific Ocean, where TOGA had concentrated its efforts, to the rest of the globe.
To consider both of these matters, the TOGA Panel of the National Research Council met with the Scientific Steering Group of the international TOGA program on 23–24 July 1990, in Kona, Hawaii. There, the TOGA Panel recommended that, to exploit the scientific advances made in understanding the dynamics of the coupled tropical ocean and global atmosphere system, a follow-on program to TOGA should be created to focus on global climate variability at seasonal-to-interannual time scales.
Toward this end, the TOGA Panel organized a series of study
sessions. These covered the Asiatic monsoons, air–sea interaction in the tropical Atlantic, and the role of extratropical SST variations. On the basis of conclusions drawn from these study sessions, the TOGA Panel then proposed to the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee (CRC) that the CRC initiate a program as a follow-on to TOGA. That program, described in this volume, is called GOALS—the Global Ocean–Atmosphere–Land System program. GOALS is envisioned as supporting the new, international, 15-year program—CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Prediction program)—about to be launched by the WCRP.
In response to the TOGA Panel's suggestion, the CRC formed a GOALS steering committee (David L.T. Anderson, Michael Ghil, David Halpern, Edward S. Sarachik, Jagadish Shukla, and J. Michael Wallace) to explore further the ideas presented by the TOGA Panel and to engage a broader community of scientists. This Steering Committee planned the GOALS Study Conference, which was held at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 1–3 March 1993. (The agenda and a list of participants appear in Appendix B of this report.) Attended by 110 scientists, the conference was organized around a number of scientific questions, each of which was addressed by an invited speaker. Taking into account the presentations and discussions at the conference, the Steering Committee assisted the CRC in preparing the GOALS science plan presented here.
The GOALS plan is for a 15-year (1995–2010) research program that builds on the success of TOGA. The plan calls for an expansion of observational, modeling, and process research to include the possible influences of the global upper oceans and time-varying land moisture, vegetation, snow and sea ice. We expect GOALS would be an important component of the CLIVAR program, and that it would benefit greatly from close cooperation with other research programs of the WCRP. We believe that a successful GOALS program would lay the foundation for a scientific basis for dynamical prediction of climate variations at seasonal-to-interannual time scales.
For their assistance in the production of this report, we are indebted to the staff of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.
JAGADISH SHUKLA, CHAIR
GOALS STEERING COMMITTEE
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
Figures
2-1 |
Schematic of major large-scale climate anomalies associated with the warm phase of the Southern Oscillation during Northern Hemisphere winter. Based on Ropelewski and Halpert (1986, 1987) and Halpert and Ropelewski (1992). |
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3-1 |
(a) Annual-mean precipitation over the tropics, after Jaeger (1976). The heavy contour encloses regions with amounts in excess of 12 cm per month; and light, intermediate, and dark shading correspond to amounts in excess of 16, 20, and 30 cm per month, respectively. (b) Annual-mean outgoing longwave radiation, for the period 1974–1991. Values below 240 Wm-2, indicated by the shading, are associated with regions of enhanced deep convective clouds. |
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3-2 |
Climatological mean sea-surface temperature (SST), surface winds, and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) over the Indian Ocean for the months of April and July. Contour interval 1K for SST; OLR values below 240 Wm-2, indicated by the shading, are associated with regions of enhanced deep convective clouds. SST and surface winds after Sadler et al. (1987). |
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3-3 |
Time-longitude section showing the depth of the 20°C isotherm along the equator in the Pacific, based on data from the TOGA Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array. Contour interval 20 m. |
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3-4 |
Time series of surface wind speed, insolation, and subsurface temperature at the TOGA TAO mooring on the equator at 140°W over an 11-day period. The subsurface time series are for the depths of (proceeding from top to bottom) 1, 3, 10, 17, 24, 30, 36, and 45 m. |
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4-1 |
GOALS program architecture, showing the interrelated components of the program. |
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4-2 |
Illustration of the partitioning of GOALS research among the various program elements (rows) and the various consortia and individual principal investigators (columns). Examples of hypothetical consortium themes are given in the text. |
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6-1 |
1000-year mean SST-anomaly fields for ENSO conditions from the Zebiak-Cane coupled model. |
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6-2 |
Functional relationship between GOALS and the other interannual research components of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The GOALS program will serve as the principal focus for basic research on seasonal-to-interannual time scales. The proposed Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and the pro |
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posed Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) would provide observations worldwide and the proposed International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRICP) would provide experimental prediction and assessments of seasonal-to-interannual climate variations. |
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7-1 |
GOALS program management structure and its relationship to the international CLIVAR program. Shown are relationships among oversight committees, science panels, project offices, federal agencies, and groups participating in the GOALS program. Also depicted are relevant components of the CLIVAR management structure and its principal communication link to the GOALS program through the project offices (dashed line). |
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A-1 |
Observed (upper) and predicted (lower) 500-mb height-anomaly fields for the warm ENSO event of the northern winter of 1982–1983. The observations are from analysis by the ECMWF; the prediction is an average of three forecasts, made at a lead time of 6 to 8 months, by Bengtsson et al. (1993). Solid contours are associated with positive height anomalies and dashed lines show negative height anomalies. |
Tables