THE OCEAN'S PARTICIPATION IN CLIMATE AND CLIMATE VARIABILITY Sample Clauses

THE OCEAN'S PARTICIPATION IN CLIMATE AND CLIMATE VARIABILITY. Beyond the coastal ocean, the broad expanse (close to 70% of the earth's surface) and large potential reservoir of the ocean for heat, freshwater, CO2, and other constituents dictate that the ocean must be considered as a key element of the climate system. To understand the ocean's role, we need to observe, understand, and model how it stores and transports these constituents and exchanges them with the atmosphere, the land, and the polar regions. The Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in the global climate system through direct influences on the surface heat budget and the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, and via links to the atmospheric circulation patterns in the Northern Hemisphere. Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a growing recognition of the critical role of sub-basin-scale oceanographic processes in the dynamics of the overall climate system. The timescales on which these processes operate and interact range from seasonal to millenial and beyond. Sustained observational studies and process experiments can provide important infor- mation about relatively high frequency processes. For information about longer frequency pro- cesses, physical oceanographers have turned increasingly to paleoceanographers. This informa- tion is needed to understand oceanographic and climate variability on long time scales. The analysis of high-resolution proxy records such as corals, ice cores, and sedimentary records can also be used to bridge the so-called spectral gap between the instrumental climate record and lower resolution geological records. Potential CICOR projects within this theme include observational programs, process experi- ments, and modeling. The observational programs can be divided in turn into three types: retro- spective analyses, broad-scale surveys, and more narrowly focused observational studies. Retro- spective analyses include the development and analysis of proxy records and the application of new methods to the re-analysis of existing data. Broad-scale surveys will use state-of-the-art observational technology to provide high quality spatial time series of multivariate oceano- graphic and atmospheric measurements; their goal is to characterize an ocean basin. Focused observational studies, which bridge the gap between broad-scale surveys and process experi- ments, involve concentrated observations of a region of a basin of particular climatic signifi- cance. An example is the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) observing ...