Advances in the Use of Historical Marine Climate Data

SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION AND RECOM-MENDATIONS. Discussions were held in breakout groups, each focusing on a range of marine variables, and the following key conclusions were drawn:• An overarching recommendation was for con-tinuing augmentation of ICOADS with in situ marine meteorological data and enhanced links to ocean data repositories, such as the World Ocean Database (e.g., Levitus et al. 1998). At least 25 million undigitized ship logbook reports exist, for instance, in U.K. national archives. In view of scarce resources, the need for data inventories and assessments to help identify priorities for digitiza-tion and datasets for incorporation into ICOADS was also highlighted.• Concern was expressed that the marine obser-vation system is in decline. Observations from VOS have decreased by more than a half since 1990, and there are now fewer than a third of the number of VOS participating in the program. As a result, the uncertainty of in situ surface products is increasing. All of the discussion groups were concerned about the diminishing data quantities, which represent a huge challenge for the future. It is essential that the marine climate community makes assessments both of its future data require-ments and the adequacy of the surface marine climate observing system, and feeds this infor-mation through to the appropriate operational bodies.562 |