International Planning

Various international activities are proceeding for all of the potential GLOBEC study systems. Discussions with IOC and SCOR are underway with regard to developing a "world view" of ocean ecosystems dynamics. The international context of the Northwest Atlantic study is most clearly defined in that our GLOBEC efforts will be the U.S. contribution to the ICES Cod and Climate Change (CCC) Program. ICES has endorsed a GLOBEC-motivated study of the ecology of cod in the North Atlantic. In developing this study the role of physical processes was considered to be critical. Accordingly, under the auspices of ICES, scientists from the North Atlantic countries will be working on:

a model of the North Atlantic circulation that provides increased detail in the coastal oceans;
development of regional models in which various biological phenomena can be embedded;
models of turbulent flow and their relationship to biology;
models of the population dynamics of the dominant species of copepods in the North Atlantic;
the development of sampling technology; and
studies of phenotypic and genotypic differences among cod stocks.

An ICES study group will be meeting in Hamburg in mid-April to discuss implementation of the CCC program. A major symposium on cod and climate change will be held in Reykjavik in the summer of 1993.

The Canadian and U.S. scientists who met in Halifax in June 1990 discussed, among other things, Canadian - U.S. participation in CCC. This meeting had as its specific objective the planning of an experiment in the Northwestern Atlantic to study this marine ecosystem and its role, together with the roles of climate and physical dynamics, in determining fisheries recruitment. The meeting scoped out the beginnings of a multi-disciplinary program bringing to bear disparate techniques and approaches ranging from numerical fluid dynamic models of ocean circulation through molecular biology and modem acoustic imaging.