Dr. Bin Wang (IPRC):
During this two days symposium, I learned great deal from many different aspects. I'm working at IPRC as a team leader of Asian-Australian monsoon. So I want to say a few words about the seasonal to decadal variation of Asian-Australian monsoon. What are the issues and the targets. I think that in the last century, great break through in meteorology is the climate prediction. And that starts from ENSO phenomena. Now we are gradually move to another big target, that is the monsoon variability, which is the more challenge in a sense that in land - ocean - atmosphere interactions, it is more complex. To think of this monsoon variability problems, I think we have some questions regarding how important the land - atmosphere interaction and how important the ocean - atmosphere interaction and how important those, so called, remote forcing, out side of monsoon domain, or monsoon ocean domain, for example ENSO, for example Pacific decadal variability. I think we know very little about the decadal variability of the monsoon. And how does it interact or is influenced by the pacific decadal oscillation. Those could be a target, also ENSO - monsoon relationship still has a lot of room to be understood.
Yasunari-san has emphasized many basic questions on the land surface processes, their roles in the monsoon variability, for example, snow covers, soil moistures, surface temperatures. Many of those we really need more observations and numerical modeling to understand. How important are those processes, compare to the monsoon, monsoon-ocean interaction. The process of the monsoon, monsoon-ocean interaction and the effect of this interaction of monsoon variations has been generally recognized especially in the Indian Ocean region. Indian Ocean Dipole is the example of the monsoon and ocean interaction. It has the tremendous impacts to the Australian monsoon and Asian monsoon also in the west pacific. But there are still a lot of concrete interaction processes we do not understand quite well. So in general, thinking of this monsoon ocean interaction, monsoon land interaction and monsoon and other major climate system variability relationship can be a target for next few years at least.
Another aspect, I think, is the variability of the sever weather event. We see the monsoon system like tropical storms, droughts and floods. Those are affected by the mean circulation change but also could possibly have the feedback to the mean circulation anomalies. The strategies, I think, mainly we should rely on the diagnosis study and numerical modeling capabilities.
