Hosted by the Inter-governmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO and co-sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization, United Nations Environment Programme and the International Council for Science, GOOS provides international and intergovernmental co-ordination of sustained observations of the oceans, a platform for the generation of oceanographic products and services and a forum for interaction between research, operational and user communities.
Important changes inphysical, chemical and biological ocean properties being monitored by the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) occur from seconds to decades with impacts over scales from metres to the globe. How can a single system be expected to monitor across such an enormous range of temporal and spatial scales? The answer is that it cannot. Despite frequent calls to be everything for everyone, the only way to sustain the GOOS is by focusing rigorously on a tractable set of key variables underpinning the provision of a core set of products and services with clear and tangible societal benefits. ?For the GOOS, focus is obtained by concentrating on two distinct modules: climate and coastal. Observations within these two modules are, for the most part, made by very different groups and also serve rather different users, although synergies between the two are possible and do exist. Observations for climate are largely made by a handful of rich countries and the dominant users are currently research scientists, although inroads into a broader user base in industry are certainly beginning to be made. Measurements contributing to the coastal module, on the other hand, are being made by more than 100 nations, from Albania to Mozambique to Vietnam, and provide the backbone for an enormous range of products and services serving a diverse array of users including researchers, coastal zone managers, port managers, ship captains, coastal developers, and the fisheries, tourism, oil and insurance industries.
As of 2008, substantial progress towards implementation of the climate module has been made, with decent global satellite coverage including altimetry, ocean colour and vector winds and well over 50% of the in situ systems in the water including buoys, moorings, floats, tide gauges and repeat ship-of-opportunity XBT hydrographic lines (Figure 1). However, current and projected future levels of national support for these measurements are clearly insufficient to either complete the system to its initial design specifications or sustain it over the long term. These later challenges will require substantial new commitments from governments, which can probably best be achieved through strengthened, preferably binding, multilateral agreement among the dozen or so member states most engaged (Alverson and Baker, 2006).
Compared with the climate module, observations within the coastal module are taken by, and of interest to, a far broader community. This breadth of interest is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides very strong and diverse user pull – a clear requirement to maintaining any sustained observing system. However, on the other hand, it also leads to an unwieldy mix of conflicting interests that cannot possibly all be satisfied, and thus to strategic plans and system designs that appear so grandiose, broad and inclusive that they are simply not tractable.
Implementation of the coastal elements of GOOS is the primary remit of the GOOS regional alliances (Figure 2). Co-operation and co-ordination among the existing regional alliances takes place through a biannual forum with rotating hosting responsibility. The last of these was hosted by GOOS Africa in Cape Town in November 2006 and the next will be hosted by the GOOS Regional Alliance for the South Pacific, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, 17–19 November 2008. Initial efforts are now underway to form regional alliances covering the Arctic and Southern Oceans as a sustained legacy of the International Council for Science (ICSU)/ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) International Polar Year in 2007–2008. The most difficult challenge facing these regional alliances as they seek to implement the coastal module of the GOOS is the mismatch between resources and expectations. Resources are provided by individual governments and institutions participating in the regional alliances, while expectations are laid out in strategic plans for the coastal module drawn up by the GOOS coastal panel of experts and adopted multilaterally by more than 100 member states at the level of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) Assembly. Unfortunately, to date, the two have been nearly orthogonal in their approach and expectations. A second difficult challenge will be to ensure that regional observing systems, particularly those providing data relevant to coastal inundation hazard warnings (Alverson, 2005), are fully compatible with regional and local cultural, social and economic needs. As with so many things, successful implementation of coastal GOOS will require thinking globally and acting locally.
k.alverson@unesco.org
|
