The Mercator-Ocean Scientific Newsletter‘s purpose is to provide a periodical forum for the circulation of ideas and research results among the operational oceanography community. It is a scientific journal addressing specialists on the covered topic. It is dedicated to operational oceanography and its latest challenges and progress.

Please consider contributing to the session on “The Earth’s energy imbalance and exchanges at the atmosphere-ocean interface: From fundamental research to societal concern,” part of the Our Common Future under Climate Change conference being held in Paris, France from 7-10 July 2015. A summary is below. The deadline for submissions is 2 March 2015; please note that you will need to submit your abstract under the parallel session theme of “Atmosphere-Ocean Interface” in order to relate to the session.

Members of the XBT (Expendable BathyThermograph) community met in November in Beijing, China, at the 4th XBT Workshop: XBT Science and the Way Forward. The meeting was an international collaboration, with 30+ attendees from regions including USA, Australia, Europe, China, India, Brazil and Japan. XBT data make up around 15% of the global historical upper-ocean temperature profile database and is used for many applications, including to study ocean currents, ocean heat content, climate change and meridional heat transport.