SECTION IX-RELATION TO OTHER U.S. AND INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS

Linkages To Other West Coast Programs

Numerous field programs, mostly sponsored by NOAA, NSF, ONR, and MMS, have obtained large volumes of multidisciplinary data from the CCS. It is expected that other studies (e.g., CoOP) will be occurring at the time of a U.S. GLOBEC CCS study. This is in addition to regular, long-term sampling programs conducted by CalCOFI, NMFS, state agencies, power plants, municipal sewage outfalls and numerous regional research and academic institutions. An example is the annual larval and juvenile rockfish survey conducted (every June; often Feb-March also) by the Tiburon NMFS laboratory in Region II of Northern California. However, most of these programs focus on a limited area, not the larger-scale and none are climate-oriented. The U.S. GLOBEC west coast regional program offers an opportunity to link other programs via regional comparison. A focused study sponsored by CoOP is in the planning stage and could be coordinated with a subset of the U.S. GLOBEC modeling activities and mesoscale studies. The U.S. GLOBEC Science Plan committee is maintaining contact with the CoOP SSC and will continue to explore mutual interests as planning proceeds.

The NMFS FORAGE study proposed to the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program, which targets ground fish along the U.S. west coast would naturally fit within the framework of a U.S. GLOBEC study. It would provide valuable data on the distribution and abundance of ground fish larvae with several distinct life history strategies. The NMFS RACE program conducts triennial summertime acoustic surveys extending along the west coast from the Queen Charlotte Islands to Point Conception; they are currently scheduled for 1995, 1998 and 2001. NOAA initiatives such as the Global Ocean Observation System (GOOS) and Coastal Forecast System (CFS) could provide resources for collecting important environmental data, and conducting long-term regional monitoring. Analysis of historical data within the retrospective component of the west coast U.S. GLOBEC program will help define the requirements for these programs. The NDBC program is planning to add further ocean instrumentation to the present buoys (workshop report in preparation), which would be especially useful for monitoring if one or more of their prototypes could be located at sites chosen in collaboration with the U.S. GLOBEC study off the west coast.

Linkages To International Programs

Mexico and Canada conduct frequent and regular physical and biological surveys off their west coasts. An example is the La Perouse Bank program off of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Both countries are developing national GLOBEC programs. International collaboration with these programs would greatly facilitate the regional comparison of mesoscale features and the study of transition zones along the west coast. NOAA, ORSTOM, and ICLARM support the CEOS program, which focuses on comparative studies of EBCs primarily as retrospective data analysis and modeling of multi-decadal and climate change. The examination of the CCS in comparison to other EBC's gives the U.S. GLOBEC program a natural link to these studies, as well as to other developing national GLOBEC programs off South America, northwest, equatorial, and southwest Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. The U.S. GLOBEC program could serve as a model for other EBC programs. The IOC and FAO have sponsored fishery recruitment studies, and would be logical partners for U.S. GLOBEC in a comparative EBC study. PICES is interested in supporting multi-national cooperative research on climatic variability and species changes in the North Pacific. U.S. GLOBEC's west coast studies could be a key component of this program. The Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) is in the process of developing a program in "Comparative Studies of Oceanic, Coastal and Estuarine Processes in Temperate Zones" and in "ENSO and Interannual Variability", which should include comparative studies off the west coasts of North and South America. GOALS is an extension of work begun during TOGA, and the TOGA-TAO observational network in the central equatorial Pacific will provide important information concerning the basin-scale climate variability during the U.S. GLOBEC study of the CCS. If possible, observations along the eastern Pacific margin, linking the two systems along the coastal wave guide, should be established during the observational period in the CCS and afterward, to complement the monitoring and prediction activities. Finally, GLOBEC International has endorsed a new recent working group on Small Pelagic Fish and Climate Change (SPACC) which will focus on living marine resouces in coastal upwelling regions, emphasizing especially Eastern Boundary Current Regions (workshop report in preparation)Ña natural link for U.S. GLOBEC's planned CCS study.