GLOBEC/ICES Working Group on Cod and Climate Change

by Keith Brander

The working group on Cod and Climate Change was established at the 1992 ICES Statutory meeting to carry forward the work begun by the ICES study group. It will meet for the first time in June 1993 in Lowestoft, U.K. under the chairmanship of Dr. K. Brander. Terms of reference for the meeting are as follows:

review planning and progress of Cod and Climate research;
review previous study group reports and ongoing regional programs to identify common elements which may serve as unifying themes and enhance comparisons between areas;
review recent advances in models of global and Atlantic climate variability, consider how these models may be used as boundary conditions for regional models, and plan a specialized workshop on the subject if necessary;
explore ways of incorporating numerical population models of key species within spatially resolved ecosystem models, in which other species are represented by a relatively small number of aggregated functional groups;
consider additional opportunities for regional studies and, if appropriate, initiate planning;
make recommendations, with terms of reference, for future meetings of the working group and/or more specialized workshops, to advance the goals of the Cod and Climate Change program.

Expertise in many fields will be needed to tackle this wide-ranging and ambitious agenda, but the scope is limited to some extent because the investigation is applied to a single species--cod. Previous reports of the ICES study group (notably ICES C.M. 1991/G:78) provide useful summaries of discussions on the application of physical models. Five questions framed by Ken Brink on the application of physical models in the Cod and Climate context are as follows:

How sophisticated do the models have to be?
Is the database adequate for intialization, model driving and evaluation?
What gaps are there in physics and biology process knowledge?
Is the cod population predictable? Is it chaotic?
What phenomena need to be resolved by the models?

It is my impression that we can answer a number of these questions and will, I hope, be able to make progress at the meeting in identifying and specifying fruitful areas for modelling and field or experimental investigation. Scientists wishing to participate in the June 1993 working group meeting should contact Dr. K. Brander, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft, Suffolk NR33 0HT, UK (Omnet: MAFF.LOWESTOFT - Attn. Keith Brander).