The U.S. CLIVAR Eastern Tropical Oceans Synthesis (ETOS) Working Group (WG) was formed in 2012.

Their scientific objectives include:

• Promote collaboration between observationalists and modelers, and atmospheric scientists and oceanographers, active in the southeast oceanic basins.
• Coordinate a model assessment of surface flux errors for the equatorial Atlantic, mining all available observations.
• Identify recent model improvements and common and persistent model errors both, CMIP5 and higher-resolution coupled models.
• Provide recommendations of cases for community simulation and evaluation using eddy-permitting ocean models, sharing specified model conditions and output datasets.

The WG is identifying and assembling satellite, buoy and research cruise datasets and assembling plots of readily available CMIP3 and CMIP5 simulations for annual and seasonal-mean values of SST, cloud cover, surface winds, thermocline depth for a climatological time period beginning ~1950 or 1980 up to 2012.