US GLOBEC Newsletter 13: Climate Workshop

| International Workshop on Environmental and Climate Variations By Ann Bucklin and Peter Wiebe About a year ago, members of the Icelandic Government's Ministry of Culture, Education, and Science and the Icelandic Research Council traveled to the United States for a series of meetings with officials in research sponsoring agencies (i.e. NSF, NOAA, EPA, etc) to discuss strengthening cooperative research ties between Iceland and the U.S. In part, the impetus for their visit was the European Union's recent Framework document, permitting research projects involving European and U.S. scientists. One outcome of these discussions was the organization of an international workshop on North Atlantic climate impacts hosted by the Icelandic Government. This meeting took place on 23-26 September and was attended by about 40 scientists from Europe and North America as well as as equal number of Icelanders. The scientific discussions took place over a three-day period (a 4th day was used for an excursion around the countryside of southwestern Iceland). The presentations were broad-ranging, covering past, present, and possible future changes in the physical and biological aspects of the marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric environments of the northern North Atlantic, as well as some of the social and economic consequences. Each half-day session included three 30-minute talks and a one and one-half hour discussion period. A rapporteur was selected for each session who was asked to distill the key scientific issues emerging from the presentations and to link these, if possible, to existing inter-national programs such as CLIVAR and GLOBEC. The rapporteurs presented their syntheses during the final session. Also in the final session, representatives of U.S. and Icelandic funding agencies presented their views on areas of cooperation and development of programs, based on the scientific issues that emerged from the discussions. Three Significant Conclusions From our perspective, three major conclusions resulted from the meeting presentations and discussions. First, there is a significant body of data providing a basic understanding of the relationship between NAO cycles and oceanographic events (both physical and biological) in the North Atlantic. There is, however, a fundamental lack of understanding about the proximate causes of climatic variation associated with switches between high and low NAO regimes. There was a consensus that research resources and priorities should be directed towards gaining a mechanistic understanding of NAO dynamics (as we have recently achieved for ENSO events in the Pacific) in order to develop a similar level of predictive capacity for NAO events. There is a significant opportunity to use an expanded GLOBEC-type of ecosystem analysis approach for this basin-wide research initiative. This was explicitly discussed at the workshop with support and interest from many participants. Second, the workshop reinforced recent published documentation of dramatic and abrupt millennial-scale cycles in atmospheric and oceanic circulation and dynamics in the North Atlantic. These cycles, driven by shifts in basin-scale circulation that occur very rapidly (years to decades), have massive impacts on climatic conditions throughout the North Atlantic, with the largest impacts centered over Iceland and Northern Europe! Currently, we have only a rudimentary understanding of these dynamics and cannot predict the shifts in ocean-basin scale circulation - much less their impact on the biological communities. Given the magnitude of potential environmental, sociological, and economic impacts resulting from an abrupt shift to a more extreme northern climate, working toward predictive understanding should become a high priority research topic. This topic area is relevant for GLOBEC-type ecosystem analysis, since it places interannual- to-decadal scale variation in context of longer-term variability. However, it remained unclear how to link the studies of these two sets of time-scales (i.e. decadal versus millennial). Third, the workshop made clear that the technical expertise and research creativity needed to address these topics resides in all of the countries bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, with a concentration of interest - and concern - in Iceland. Any concerted approach to understanding climatic variation in the North Atlantic will require a coordinated, multi-disciplinary, and genuinely international effort. The efforts of the U.S. NSF, NOAA, and the Icelandic Research Council should be continued to ensure that this international workshop and planning effort will result in an international research program. A second meeting, oriented toward international science policy, took place on 28 September. This meeting pro-vided a forum for Icelandic and U.S. science administrators and scientists to convey their vision for a new era of US-Icelandic scientific cooperation. The presentations in the morning provided background on the U.S. and Icelandic science funding agency perspectives on international scientific collaboration. The afternoon sessions focused on specific areas of collaboration which, for the most part, were non-overlapping with those distilled from the previous week's workshop. The final portion of the afternoon session was an exchange of letters intended to foster international scientific collaboration between the U.S. and Iceland. Representing the U.S. was Robert Corell, who presented a letter from Rita Colwell, director of NSF. Replying in kind with a letter of response was Vilhjálmur Lúðvíksson, director of the Icelandic Research Council. The meeting ended with a reception hosted by U.S. Ambassador Day Olin Mount and held at his residence in Reykjavik. Last updated: 21 February, 1999 Please address any comments, suggestions or questions to: GLOBEC Webmaster