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          The National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) will hold a Town Hall meeting during OS 2010, entitled: Ocean Partnerships: Collaborative Oceanographic Research for the Future. One of the projects featured will be ECCO-GODAE. The meeting takes place on Tuesday, February 23r
d, from 11:45 to 12:45 in room D139. 
                
               
          
           Work by R.M. Ponte and K.J. Quinn on Bottom pressure changes around Antarctica and wind-driven meridional flows was picked as Editors' Highight in the Geophysical Research Letters' recent volume 36.. 
                
               
        
           The MIT/AER ECCO-GODAE project issued a new solution of its recent version 3 system. The new solution uses atmospheric state fields as control variables in conjunction with an adjoint of the Large and Yeager surface boundary layer scheme, as well as a dynamic/thermodynamical sea-ice model. The solution has been update through the end of 2007 (calculations through end of 2008 are under way). The new solution is available via ECCO's LAS server at MIT. 
                
               
           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) 
                
               
              
               In a collaboration with the San Diego Computer  Center (SDSC)
                ECCO embarks on producing a Southern Ocean  state estimate based
                on the adjoint method. After successfully  tackling technical difficulties in 
                setting up an adjoint model at 1/6 degree  horizontal resolution which can
                run efficiently on 600 pocessors of SDSC's IBM  Power-4 "DataStar"                production has begun by fitting the MIT general  circulation model (MITgcm)
                to a variety of observation during the year  2004.
                The work led by MIT's Matthew Mazloff was  featured in the 
                April 2006 issue of the SDSC Nuggets magazine 
                ("Predicting the State of the Ocean") and Issue 4,   Febbruary  2006 of SDSC Thread ("Estimating the State of the Southern  Ocean") by Matthew Mazloff. 
                
               
              
               In a news story for the Computerworld magazine  talks about
                current limitations in computing horsepower for  climate simulations. (Click here for the full story)                  
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