2. Summary
Symposium on Indo-Pacific Climate: Discussion Session
TUE. March 7, 2000, 18:30-19:15
Despite the extremely busy schedule, we had 43 excellent talks, which showed the recent progress of the Indo-Pacific climate studies. It is unbelievable that there have been no workshops so far focused on this important sector of the world climate Therefore it is quite important to summarize our unique messages deliverable to the world climate research community (particularly to the CLIVAR Monsoon Panel) and to policy makers. For this purpose, a summary session was introduced at the end of the SIPC to identify current scientific targets and to explore necessary measures to achieve theses with both observational and modeling efforts. Each session chair was asked to summarize his/her session along the above line as succinctly as possible.
Session Summary: Outlines of the Sessions
1st Session: Indian Ocean Climate (Chairs: S. Godfrey and T.Yamagata)
Based on excellent talks given by Drs. Duvel, Godfrey and Rjagopalan, we recognized the importance of interactions among different scales and different phenomena in the Indo-Pacific sector. Those are synoptic, intraseasonal, seasonal, interannual and decadal scales. In terms of real phenomena, those are ENSO, Monsoon, Indian Ocean Dipole, Indonesian Throughflow (IT) and Eurasian continental warming. To understand observational data and to design an appropriate observational system, we should keep considering vigorous interaction among phenomena of different space and time scales.
Second, we learned a lot about the newly discovered coupled phenomenon in the tropical Indian Ocean, i.e. Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). It was discovered in 1999 but it only took just half a year to understand the phenomenon using low/high resolution coupled models. This is amazing in comparison with the centennial history of ENSO studies. By accelerating implementation of a reasonable ocean observation system, we are just about to predict the IOD. Drs. Vinayachandran, Saji and Matsuura gave impressive talks on diagnostic studies and OGCMs & CGCMs simulations on the Dipole Mode and the Dipole Mode Index. Dr. Jin gave a stimulating conceptual model to explain the IOD by stressing the importance of ocean dynamics and the wind-evaporation feedback.
