U.S. CLIVAR

In January 2007, the US National Science and Technology Council's Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology (JSOST) released its Ocean Research Priorities Plan (ORPP - http://ocean.ceq.gov/about/docs/orpp12607.pdf). This plan identified Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and its relationship to sudden climate change as one of four near-term (5 year) research priorities.

Fortunately, within US CLIVAR we have had discussions over the past two years about the potentially important role of Atlantic ocean decadal-scale variability on climate, predictability within the Atlantic basin, and developing experimental prediction capabilities (see Variations V4N3; report from an Atlantic Decadal Variability Workshop, Miami, January 2007 - http://www.usclivar.org/science_status/AMOC/AOML_DecadalWorkshopReport_Final.pdf; and a workshop on an AMOC monitoring system for the South Atlantic, Argentina, March 2007 - report in press).

In response to the ORPP, a US inter-agency group, coordinated through the US CLIVAR Office, established an AMOC Planning Team to develop a 5-yr phased AMOC Implementation Plan addressing relevant goals outlined in the ORPP. This AMOC Planning Team, co-chaired by Drs Susan Lozier (Duke University) and Katherine Kelly (University of Washington), has completed a draft of this Plan (currently in review draft form). This plan should be released by the end of September 2007.

US AMOC Strategy [under review]