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AGU's Fall Meeting 2008 will feature an ECCO session, identified as OS04: CLIVAR/GODAE: The ECCO State Estimates. This session will provide an opportunity for ECCO product users to (a) describe the scientific implications of their results, (b) enhance the feedback from the broader community to the Consortium, (c) foster the interaction between ECCO members and other scientists who utilize the state estimates. The oral part (OS41F) will take place on Thursday, Dec. 18th, starting 8am in MW Room 2022. It is preceded by a poster session (OS31C) on Wednesday, Dec. 17th, starting 8am, in MC Hall D.
As part of his Ph.D. thesis, Matt Mazloff has produced an eddy-permitting state estimate at 1/6 degree horizontal resolution of the Southern Ocean, covering the Argo-rich period 2005/06. The adjoint-based solution is dynamically consistent and enables closed budget calculations of various quantities. Matt's thesis was featured in the SDSC Thread Newsletter, and more recently in WHOI's Oceanus magazine (Corralling the Wild and Wooly Southern Ocean).
A fifty year state estimate covering 1950 to 2000
is now available on the ECCO LAS server at SDSC The estimate was produced by the "German ECCO" (GECCO) group at the University of Hamburg
The product is described in
Koehl, A., D. Dommenget, K. Ueyoshi, D. Stammer, The Global ECCO
1952 to 2001 Ocean Synthesis Report No.40, March 2006.
In collaboration with web designer Colleen Boisvert
ECCO has launched a new overall project web site.
Main purpose of this site is to provide an integrated view
of ECCO and it's follow-on projects
(ECCO-GODAE, ECCO2, GECCO, ...).
It is hoped that readers will get a clear understanding
of
ECCO's various activities, and will find
among ECCO's various ocean state estimation products
those which best suit their needs.
We welcome any feedback you may wish to provide.
Scientists at MIT have developed a new marine ecosystem model that allows its populations of
phytoplankton to realistically evolve, reflecting the diversity in populations in the natural world. This
should lead to a better understanding of the coupling between ocean and atmospheric chemistry.
The model makes use of ECCO's ocean state estimate to capture the physical environment in
which the ecosystem evolves. The study "Emergent Biogeography of Microbial Communities in a
Model Ocean" by Michael J. Follows, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, Scott Grant, and Sallie W. Chisholm was published in today's issue of Science magazine. It is part of the MIT Darwin Project and funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
(Click here for a related MIT News Story)
In a collaboration between the San Diego Supercomputing Center
(SDSC) and ECCO,
a large part of the ECCO products have been transfered to
SDSC's Datacentral and managed via Storage Resource Broker (SRB). To make these data available to the community via
different commonly used servers and software tools,
including DODS/OPeNDAP and LAS,
SDSC's DataCentral specialist Roman Olschanowsky
and MIT's Constantinos Evangelinos successfully
implemented DODS/OPeNDAP on top of SRB.
The SRB system allows fast and easy data access
across various disk and tape resources while ensuring
archiving/backup capability.
High speed access to the SDSC data using the SRB client tools is also
available.
On December, 13, 2006, AGU awarded the Bowie Medal to Carl Wunsch "For his wide-ranging research in the study of the ocean and its roles in shaping Earth's climate and its changes, and for unselfish cooperation in the field of physical oceanography." Read Citation
A unique set of roughly 320,000 individual sub-surface measurements
of salinity (conductivity), temperature, and depth (CTD) taken by elephant
seals which carried bio-logging and telemetry devices
was added to the ECCO state estimation system as new
observational constraints.
The data were kindly provided by the "Southern Elephant Seals as
Oceanographic Samplers" (SEaOS) project involving
the University of St. Andrew's NERC Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) and the British Antarctic Survey. The uniqueness of the data derives from the ability of seals
to go under the sea-ice which covers large parts of the Southern
Ocean poleward of 60S during austral winter and where in-situ data
are not available otherwise.
Working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), experts at the NAS facility visualized, in real time, a one-year ocean simulation with 330 million grid cells running on 2,048 processors of the Columbia supercomputer.
(Click here for more details)
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