ICPO attended the 2021 PICES POC Committee Meeting

The Physical Oceanography and Climate (POC) Committee Meeting of PICES was organized on 1st October 2021 online. Over 20 participants including POC members and representatives from International Observers (Argo, CLIVAR, IOCCP, NPRB and SOLAS) attended the meeting. The major contents of the meeting included: presentation and updates from international observers, PICES and UN Ocean Decade, progress and future plans from relevant PICES working groups and sections, new proposals and POC Action Plan, and etc. Jose Santos and Jing Li from the ICPO attended the meeting in representation of CLIVAR with a poster submitted. There were a few potential cooperation areas that can be further explored, e.g., UN Ocean Decade, ocean carbon, climate extremes and coastal impacts, and etc.

The major points that were relevant to CLIVAR include:

  1. Dr. Jose Santos gave a brief presentation on behalf of CLIVAR, highlighting the important changes of WCRP (e.g., new implementing structure with two new core projects and five lighthouse activities being developed), the past and ongoing cooperation between CLIVAR and PICES, as well as the upcoming events of CLIVAR in 2022 and onward. Dr. Shoshiro Minobe presented the WCRP Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change (EPESC), highlighted the long-term cooperation between WCRP/CLIVAR and PICES, and looked forward to the future cooperation in addressing new challenges related to climate and ocean researches.  
  2. The CLIVAR-PICES Joint Working Group on Climate and Ecosystem Predictability (WG-40) will be completed by the end of 2021, with a special issue on North Pacific Climate and Ecosystem Predictability on Seasonal to Decadal Timescales published in Frontiers in Marine Sciences and a final report being developed.
  3. Two new working group proposals were discussed during the meeting: one is on ‘Climate Extremes and Coastal Impacts in the Pacific’, which aims to increase the understanding of the drivers, predictability and impacts of CLIVAR extremes, as a follow-up to WG-40. This new working group will bring in interested scientists from CLIVAR, WCRP (particularly the Lighthouse Activities on EPESC, My Climate Risks, and WCRP Academy), Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) and Early Career Ocean Professionals (ECOP). The other proposal is on ‘Submesoscale processes and marine ecosystem’, which links closely to a previous Working Group on ‘Mesoscale and Submesoscale processes’ (WG-38) that was also relevant to CLIVAR.
  4. Several initiatives under the UN Ocean Decade were discussed during the meeting, which include: the ICES/PICES Ocean Decade (IPOD) Steering Committee, the UN Decade endorsed programme on Sustainability, Predictability and Resilience of Marine Ecosystem (SUPREME); and the Costal-SOS programme proposed by SOLAS to be endorsed by the Decade.