Attending: J. Bisagni, D. Gifford, E. Durbin, R. Beardsley, C. Ashjin, G. Lough, P. Wiebe, D. Mountain, D. Townsend, R. Groman. John Quinlan also attended.
The meeting was called to order at 10:10. Peter introduced the agenda and asked for any additions. None were offered.
1) Preparation for next week's GLOBEC SSC meeting:
Bob Beardsley, as member of the SSC, will present an update of activities in the Georges Bank program. Peter, who is ex officio on the SSC, will not be able to attend. Bob will need to give an update on Phase III and introduction to activities for Phase IV. For Phase IV, the structure of the synthesis activity can be presented. Under Phase III a number of products have been issued: the second DSR volume was published; there is a JGR issue on physical oceanographic results that is in preparation; and there are a number of manuscripts that have been or are about to be submitted. Bob Groman will send a message to GGBSI to ask for any publications that have been submitted in the last year. There is an article for the Oceanography Journal in preparation. There were a number of workshops held last year. Peter has list of 19 major findings/contributions from the Georges Bank study, compiled for a previous SSC meeting. Bob will try to get a list of similar bullets focusing on cross frontal exchange. The issues Bob will highlight will be the workshops, publications, cross frontal exchange bullets, an update on the finite volume modeling being done by Chen, and results from Houghton's dye work. In addition Bob would like to include something about the haddock stock recovery and the high haddock recruitment in 1998, which apparently was not the result of more eggs, but of something in the early life history. David Mountain will help put this together for Bob. Ted Durbin pointed out that the spring of 1998 has particularly high abundance of calanus nauplii.
John Quinlan will be giving a science talk about modeling the interaction circulation and scallop spawning (and other issues involving bio-physical modeling). David Mountain also will be giving a science talk on the potential effects of climate change on the regional fisheries and issues that could be relevant to Phase IV investigations.
2) Oceanography Journal Article
A special issue of the Oceanography Journal will be dedicated to US GLOBEC, including ten chapters. One chapter is to be about Georges Bank. The article should address the retrospective analyses, modeling, process and broad-scale studies done in the program. The target date is December 15, so Peter is targeting November. He will do a draft and pass it around EXCO for comments and additions.
3) Phase IV Planning
Peter reviewed the Phase IV structure laid out in the preamble document prepared for the Phase IV proposals. The first year includes workshops on various themes and a symposium at the end of the year on biological/physical interactions synthesis of the process and broad scale components. While we dont know who will get funded, a basic scheduling of the workshops and symposium were laid out. January of 2003 would seem an appropriate time for the symposium, approximately one year after funding would start. Tentative plans are for the stratification workshop to be in the spring (March), the retention/loss and cross frontal exchange workshops to be back-to-back in early summer (the end of June), and the Broad Scale workshop to be in the fall (October). The locations would be somewhere in New England. More detailed planning specific dates, locations and leaders cannot be determined until after the Phase IV funding decisions are known.
General discussion occurred on what might come after GLOBEC. A number of possible programs are being thought about or discussed.
4) Preparations for the AGU/ALSO Ocean Sciences Meeting
There is not a specific GLOBEC session in the meeting schedule, but at least one session would be appropriate for GLOBEC contributions: Marine ecosystem responses to climate: the responses of Large Marine Ecosystems to interdecadal-scale climate variability (co-sponsors Greene, Fogarty, Mantua). While we have not studied interdecadal variability, per se, understanding of the underlying processes connecting the physics and biology as done in GLOBEC would seem appropriate for this session. A note will be sent to GGBSI concerning the meeting.
5) Visualization Software update
Being able to deal with the large data base that is being generated will require better visualization capabilities. The Program Office has supported the development visualization software to help with this. The work has been done with a visualization system developed at UNH (GeoZui3D) and adding additional capabilities that are tailored to the types of data generated in GLOBEC - as compared to the bathymetric and multi-beam acoustic data for which the UNH system was developed. Skip Little at WHOI has been working on this. This has been done after discussions with the JGOFS group, which is also developing visualization tools, to insure the two efforts are not duplicating each other.
Skip has developed tools to take data from the JGOFS data base, pass it through a MATLAB interface and into GeoZui3D. There are three interfaces for different types of data. The first is for point source data; the second is to import acoustic data to make 3D curtain plots; the third is to import data from the Smith and Sandwell bathymetry data set for an area of interest. A number of other capabilities are being considered (e.g., vector plots, time-series plots, volume rendering; output of the data and of the image). The application is currently being used on a single platform, i.e. on a PC machine with an open GL graphics compatible graphics card. Data are downloaded to that machine and then visualized. Many new PCs support the open GL standard with an appropriate graphics card.
A demonstration of this system will be presented at the GLOBEC SSC meeting next week.
The meeting adjourned at 12:35.