# Presentation: 649873

## WOCE and BEYOND

- WHY DID WE DO WOCE?
- WHAT DOES THE EXPERIENCE TELL US ABOUT FUTURE PROGRAMS?

## What would physical oceanography be like 

- if WOCE had not taken place?
- What would we know about the role of
- the ocean in climate without WOCE?

## What oceanography would have been like without 

- WOCE is Impossible to say!
- A problem in philosophy and metaphysics, not science.
- At the time WOCE was formulated however, there was
- no global oceanography, no focus on climate change.
- Physical oceanography was a patchwork of individual
- and institutional efforts, with ad hoc, temporary,
- collaborations. Funding was in a slow decline.
- WOCE now looks “inevitable’’. Was it? Answer left
- to the reader.

## Conceived in late-1970snot so easy to re-capture thinking of the time:

- Era of the new process studies built on newly available technologies: upwelling regions (CUEA), mesoscale eddies (MODE, POLYMODE), internal waves (IWEX), Florida Current and Drake Passage transports (ISOS), Pacific surface temperature anomalies (NORPAX),...

## Models were either global and ‘sticky’ or regional just showing mesoscale eddies in a simplified geometry
Long sections seemed a relic of an earlier era.
Very few paid attention to global scales

- Long sections seemed a relic of an earlier era.
- Very few paid attention to global scales

## MAIN DRIVERS:

- End of FGGE (Global Weather Experiment) and turn
- by meteorological community to climate (second GARP
- objective.
- Call by R. Revelle and others for understanding of the
- great carbon dioxide experiment.
- Major technical developments in observational physical
- and tracer oceanography
- A sense, by a few, that the ocean was far more time-dependent
- than the textbooks made out.
- “At NSF, oceanography means 500 individual PI-s. How am
- I supposed to explain where the field is going to higher
- management? We keep losing in the budget allocations.”
-  (NSF Program Manager, about 1979)

## Technologies that seemed to make a global experiment

- feasible *included:*
- Reliable CTDs.
- Multi-year current meters and other moored devices
- SOFAR/RAFOS and paper design of descendents
- (ALACE,...)
- Acoustic tomography*
- Satellite altimetry, scatterometry+, and gravity*
- GPS
- Autoanalyzers for nutrients; growing precision of
- CFC, CO2†, tritium/helium-3 measurements
- Ever growing computer power
- Internet (for data exchange), but no one thought of it.
- *Did not come to pass. +Only partially realized. †Spun-off
- into JGOFS.

## (Mike Cox from Climatological Winds. )

**Notes:**
From Mike Cox

## R. Cheney

## W. F. Simmons

## T. Rossby

## V. Worthington

## Peixoto/Oort

- Mean surface
- flow

## Dynamic height, Peixoto and Oort from Levitus

## Post IGY  (1959) Long-line hydrography, pre-WOCE planning

## Slide 16

## Mean KE

- Variance
- KE

- Ratio

## Surface elevation

- Bottom pressure variation.

- -25 to 25 cm

## Slide 19

## Slide 20

## Slide 21

## Slide 22

## Slide 23

## “Why is Carl trying to ruin his career?”

- (asked of my wife by a prominent physical
- oceanographer, circa 1985)
- “Now I know why you wanted to do WOCE.
- It  was inevitable!”  (same prominent
- physical oceanographer, about 1992)
- “It must have been really easy to get TOPEX/POSEIDON flown.” (post-doc WOCE YIW, summer 2000)
- “Why do you say that?”
- “Because it’s so obviously a great idea.”
- “It took 13 years.”
- “Oh.”

## WHY WAS IT SO HARD?  A handful of oceanographers took seriously work on the global ocean. A hundred year tradition of individual PI-s having control of a ship for a few weeks to a month or so.Models extremely primitive and difficult to relate to any observed fields (a few pioneers were trying).A culture of contempt for anyone attempting to organize colleagues (“grand schemers”).

- General soft money support leads to short-term thinking and planning.  The long-term is a luxury few could afford.

## Difficult to separate what we collectively accomplished from

- what might have happened anyway. The field
- would have evolved.
- It does seem reasonable to conclude however, that we would not have had the satellites nor the global hydrography and float coverage. We are indeed at a new level of capability and understanding

## LESSONS FOR FUTURE

- REQUIRED A *VERY *SMALL GROUP OF DETERMINED INDIVIDUALS
- WAS A BOTTOM-UP IDEA: SCIENTISTS WHO WANTED A WOCE APPROACHED NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS---NOT REVERSE

## REASONS WHY FORMULATING AND ORGANIZINGNEW PROGRAMS MIGHT BE EASIER THAN FOR WOCEExample of WOCE itself.A nucleus of scientists who regard oceanography and climate as intrinsically global.

- New generation models with a considerable degree of quantitative skill and real state estimation/experimental design capability.Governments appear to have accepted the necessity ofoperational oceanographic satellites. (But the battleis never completely won.)
- New technologies of several kinds. Growing independence of ships.

## Scientific homework has to be done. Must sound

- like one knows what one is doing. The standard
- is not very high, but it exists. This planning element
- is necessary, but not sufficient, to get a large program
- underway.

## WHY MIGHT IT BE MORE DIFFICULT IN THEFUTURE THAN IT WAS FOR WOCE?Exhaustion of a comparatively small community.A higher level of basic understanding renders prioritydecisions more quantitative and thus more difficult(WOCE had a major element of description: whatis going on?)Entry of operational entities tending to marginalizescientists.Very long time scales mean that one cannot set an “end”to the program, as was necessary for WOCE.

## As we move to global sustained programs, the challenge

- to scientists is to keep some control over the observation
- and estimation systems
- Oceanic variability time scales are:
- (1) long compared to the instrumental record now in
- existence.
- (2) long compared to promotion/tenure/grant duration
- time scales.
- (3) long compared to human lifetimes
- Temptation is to ignore this problem. In WOCE had luxury
- of starting from a very low knowledge base.  Could focus on
- determining the oceanic state “today”.

## There is an intergenerational responsibility:

- If the deep Indian Ocean is now changing, but no
- one is observing it, what will our successors be able
- to say in 50 years? Neither academics nor governments
- are very good at long-term thinking.
- There are people in this room who will know the outcome
- 50 years from now; some may in fact, determine it.
- If one thinks back to where we were 50 years ago,
- it is likely the science will have been transformed
- almost beyond recognition.

## Both the health of our science, and societal needs, require that we collectively sustain the kind of thought and effort that led to WOCE.