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The 25^th Session of the Joint Steering Committee of the WCRP

Alan O’Neill¹ ( alan@met.reading.ac.uk), and A.R. Ravishankara² (A.R.Ravishankara@al.noaa.gov), SPARC co-Chairs (on behalf of the SPARC SSG)

¹Data Assimilation Research Centre, Reading, UK
²NOAA-Aeronomy Laboratory, Boulder CO, USA

The 25^th session of WCRP’s Joint Steering Committee (JSC) was held at the Headquarters of the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, from 1 to 6 March 2004. It included a joint, one-day session with the Scientific Committee of the IGBP. M.-L. Chanin, A. O’Neill and A.R. Ravishankara attended on behalf of SPARC.

JSC sessions review progress in achieving WCRP general aims with special attention to the advances within the four WCRP core projects – CliC, CLIVAR, GEWEX and SPARC. The JSC itself is keen to act as a sounding board for new ideas, and to offer advice and encouragement to the projects. This year’s session was especially important because WCRP is framing its specific objectives for the coming decade, and is deciding what changes in its programme and structure will be necessary to achieve them. WCRP is placing renewed emphasis on prediction, and is putting forward an initiative provisionally titled Coordinated Observation and Prediction of the Earth System (COPES), which will confront the scientific and technical challenges posed by the long-term goal of a seamless prediction problem, from weeks through decades to the projection of climate change. A COPES Task Force is being set up, supported by a Modelling Panel and by a Working Group on Observation and Assimilation of the Climate System. The WCRP projects have been asked to formulate plans to participate in the COPES initiative, and to seek opportunities to work together.

In their presentation to the JSC of developments in SPARC, A. O’Neill and A.R. Ravishankara noted that SPARC has anticipated the emphasis of COPES by formulating all three of its new themes around the related issues of our ability to attribute and to predict changes in the climate system. They suggested that SPARC is the main repository in WCRP of expertise in the area of chemistry-climate interactions, and A.R. Ravishankara presented further details of the rationale behind, and progress with, SPARC’s theme on Stratospheric Chemistry and Climate Interactions. He mentioned, in particular, that encouraging progress had been made in developing this theme as a joint initiative with IGAC.

The SPARC presentation culminated in some specific questions to the JSC concerning SPARC’s evolution. Specifically, should SPARC lead WCRP’s efforts within COPES on chemistry-climate interactions in both the stratosphere and the troposphere? Moreover, the JSC was asked: should this major research area evolve into a new WCRP project linked to activities in IGBP, and if so on what timescale? The JSC was unequivocal in their support for SPARC taking a leading role on climate-chemistry interactions within WCRP, be it of stratospheric or tropospheric importance. The timescale for the metamorphosis of SPARC into a larger climate-chemistry project will depend on the progress made within this theme of SPARC.

In the joint session between WCRP and IGBP, A.R. Ravishankara presented a short summary of the progress made by the joint IGAC-SPARC endeavour in the area of climate-chemistry interactions. The two (of the three) co-chairs of IGAC were also present at this joint session. Clearly, the joint venture is the first of its kind and has its origin in the initiatives taken by M.-L. Chanin and M. Geller, the previous co-chairs of SPARC. This joint venture was appreciated and encouraged by both IGBP and WCRP. It also became clear during the joint session, and the discussions thereafter, that other close collaborations between WCRP and IGBP would not emerge immediately. The most likely collaboration in the near future will be between the newly formed WCRP Working Group on Surface Fluxes and the SOLAS project. It also became clear that the collaborations have to emerge from the "trenches" (i.e. from working scientists themselves), rather than from the “top”. In the future, as need arises in the area of chemistry-climate interactions, SPARC is likely to closely interact with the fluxes group and SOLAS. Such collaborations will surely arise when the need is clear, as in the case of the IGAC-SPARC collaboration.

There were many compliments at the JSC to the approach - i.e., taking on "small" tasks and bringing them to fruition - taken by SPARC in the past and now. Both the JSC and S. Solomon of IPCC commended the mini-assessments of SPARC.

The JSC clearly saw the need for more interactions between projects and working groups within WCRP. From the perspective of SPARC, we need to start attending the SSG meetings of the projects and working groups, whenever possible. Further, we need to invite key members of the other projects and working groups to our SSG and General Assembly.

Lastly, the officers of JSC and the project/working group co-chairs are to meet more often than in the annual JSC meetings. Such a meeting was held in late 2003 in Geneva and another one is planned for the fall 2004. This is an excellent venue for bringing forth any issues of specific concern to SPARC to the attention of the JSC. We really should take advantage of these more "informal" meetings to better communicate the concerns and desires of SPARC. Therefore, the SPARC community is hereby requested to bring to the attention of the co-chairs and the project office director any issues that they feel needs to be aired out. SPARC is ours, WCRP is ours! Let us make it work for us.