Strategic Cooperation Council Newsletter
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Monday, February 26, 2018
In this edition:
EGU Meeting
TERN Advisory Board
Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Southern Ocean Array
Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) Workshop
Opportunities
Publications
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RSVP for COOP+ Open Board & CoopEUS Strategic Cooperation Board Meeting at EGU
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LOCATION
River Room
DATE AND TIME
04/13/18
9:00am -
04/13/18
11:00am
Meliá Hotel Vienna
Donau City Strasse 7
1220 Vienna Austria
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Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Advisory Board
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Dr James Cleverly,
TERN Australia
The Advisory Board gives a voice to TERN partner institutions and sponsors regarding optimal deployment of environmental research infrastructure that supports achieving national research priorities and Australia’s obligations under international treaties. The Advisory Board is not ‘incorporated’ and thus can only provide recommendations to TERN’s host institution, the University of Queensland, which is the Lead Agent for the funding contract with the Commonwealth of Australia. Notwithstanding its advisory role, the Commonwealth expects the Advisory Board's recommendations and endorsements to be taken into account by the Lead Agent.
The TERN Advisory Board consists of representatives from TERN's institutional partners, Australian states and the Commonwealth. The Advisory Board thus provides a mechanism by which TERN's stakeholders can give input to and direction for deployment of the country's environmental infrastructure. Furthermore, the TERN Advisory Board provides guidance for implementing directives from the Australian Government's
National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy
,
which provides financial support to TERN.
Ex officio
members of the TERN Advisory Board include the current TERN Director along with representatives of TERN's Lead Agent (the University of Queensland) and the Australian government's Department of Environment and Energy.
The structure of the TERN Advisory Board includes a standing sub-committee, the
Science Advisory Committee
.
The SAC delivers independent advice to the Advisory Board on long-term scientific directions and the evolution of TERN's research infrastructure. It also provides partner institutions on the Advisory Board oversight of the quality of TERN infrastructure and data services for research purposes.
TERN is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy
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Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Southern Ocean Array
(55S, 90W) Improves Weather Forecast Data
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Dr Robert Weller,
WHOI
In February 2015, the U.S. NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) deployed an array of four moorings at 55
o
S, including the deployment of the most southerly surface mooring established as a sustained ocean observing platform. The OOI
Global Southern Ocean Array
is one of four sites in the OOI focusing on the critical, yet under-sampled, high-latitude regions of the Pacific and Atlantic. One of the key scientific objectives of deploying this array was to provide key data to a very sparsely sampled area to better help modelers and forecasters understand the dynamic and volatile environment of the Southern Ocean.
As of August 9, 2017, data from the
Surface Mooring
of the Southern Ocean Array was integrated into the Global Telecommunication System (GTS) via the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) making these data more easily accessible for weather forecasters and modelers. Real time data from the surface buoy was being delivered into the OOI data system. However, OOI did not have the capability in place to place the data on the GTS. Bob Weller’s group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), with support from a COOPEUS grant from NSF, developed the code and worked with the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) to put the OOI Southern Ocean surface buoy data on GTS.
This OOI global array surface moorings telemeter surface meteorology, and the raw data have one-minute averages of surface meteorological sensors. To make the OOI data compatible with the lower sampling rate data typically placed on GTS, six ten-minute averages were computed and sent once an hour. These data are contributing to an international effort to improve environmental prediction for the polar regions and beyond known as the Year of Polar Prediction
(
http://www.polarprediction.net/yopp-activities/
) that runs from mid-2017 to mid-2019 and is organized by the World Meteorological Organization.
In just the few weeks since its integration into the GTS, these data were tagged as having a big forecast impact by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (
ECMWF
). On August 19, 2017, the Surface Buoy picked up a low pressure system moving through the area. By integrating these data into their forecast models, researchers were able to fill in some key spatial gaps in their observational coverage and overall reduce their 24-hr forecast error. With errors reduced in their forecast model, ECMWF was then better able to forecast the next huge Southern Ocean storm with a central pressure around 955 mb that had simultaneous major impacts on southern South America, Drake Passage, and the Antarctic Peninsula.
In addition to its surface buoy (pictured), the OOI Southern Ocean Array includes a network of moorings that support sensors for measurement of air-sea fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum; physical, biological and chemical properties throughout the water column. A full list of instrumentation on the Array is posted on the
OOI website
and data can be downloaded from the
OOI Data Portal
, as well as accessed through the GTS.
View the full Science Highlight from the OOI Newsletter
here
.
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Dr. Samantha Weintraub,
NEON
February 13-15, 2018
, 55 researchers spanning several environmental observatory networks, disciplines, career stages, and countries gathered at NEON headquarters in Boulder, CO to discuss opportunities and synergies for using observation networks to advance Earth system understanding. The meeting was organized around four broad themes: Conceptual Models, Model Structures, Data Accessibility, and Data-Model Integration. From Keynote presentations to focus and lightning talks, attendees offered diverse ideas and perspectives, spanning disciplines from population ecology to soil biogeochemistry and eco-hydrology. Common themes included new insights gained from observatory network data, the need to link data and models, and efforts to make modeling tools more accessible.
Besides facilitating exchange of ideas across disciplinary and network boundaries, attendees brainstormed several possible cross-network synthesis projects. These included using conceptual models developed by ‘bottom-up’ networks to help frame new ‘top-down’ monitoring efforts like NEON, applying dimensionless numbers for cross-network synthesis, using ecosystem re-analysis to combine observatory network data with models to re-construct past ecosystem variables, and leveraging different networks and the spatio-temporal scales and gradients they encompass to shed light on soil C dynamics and our ability to model them.
Participants suggested potential follow-on activities to further build integrative user communities, including cross-network webinar series, integration of all-hands meetings, organization of follow-up conferences, creation of memorandums of understanding, more training courses where students get exposure to both data and models, and more. Much of the meeting was live-streamed, and recordings of the sessions will soon be posted to the meeting webpage.
Figure 4 taken from
Richter, D. D., Billings, S. A., Groffman, P. M., Kelly, E. F., Lohse, K. A., McDowell, W. H., Riebe, C., Silver, W. L., White, T. S., Anderson, S., Brantley, S., Brecheisen, Z. S., Chadwick, O. A., Hartnett, H. E., Hobbie, S. E., Kazanski, C. E., Markewitz, D., O'Neill, K., Schroeder, P., and Thompson, A.: Elevating the biogeosciences within environmental research networks, Biogeosciences Discuss.,
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2018-67
,
in review, 2018.
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OPPORTUNITIES / CALL FOR PAPERS
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Focus on Environmental Research Infrastructures:
New Scientific Capabilities to Address Global Challenges
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In this
Focus Collection
, the scientific and technological capabilities of current environmental research infrastructures (RIs) will be evaluated for their ability to address global environmental challenges. This call is looking for cooperative and interdisciplinary contributions that put together ideas from ecology, biogeochemistry, Earth sciences and/or social sciences to describe the role of research infrastructures in providing part of the global solution.
Contributors are encouraged to describe fruitful cooperative constellations involving research infrastructures and global networks, academia and industry. In addition, identifying data, technology and social gaps that are hindering global action should also be included to contribute to potential maturation process in regards to the respective global challenge.
Due by
April 15, 2018.
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Dear Colleague Letter: Belmont Forum Joint Initiative with BiodivERsA
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NSF's Directorate for Geosciences is participating with the Belmont Forum on a new call for proposals,
"Scenarios of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services II,"
in partnership with BiodivERsA.
This call invites proposals that explicitly address a biodiversity scenario, considering the following definition: "Scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services are the outputs of the combination of scenarios of indirect drivers and direct drivers — such as land use change, invasive alien species, overexploitation, or pollution — and models of impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services."
Due by
March 9, 2018.
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We're extremely proud of relevant publications from the team pertaining to CoopEUS and COOP+ projects. Please see a complete list of related publications on the
SCC Publication webpage
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Chris Lenhardt
Strategic Cooperation Council Chair
Henry W. Loescher
Lead PI
Francisco Javier Bonet García
COOP+ H2020
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Questions or comments please contact:
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Melissa A. Genazzio
SAVI Staff Scientist
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CoopEUS is funded by NSF's
Science Across Virtual Institutes
(SAVI)
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