Building a global ocean observing system for climate

Observation is the key to describing, understanding, and predicting the Earth\´s climate system. The NOAA Office of Climate Observation (OCO) supports oceanic and marine meteorology projects designed to contribute to the implementation of a global climate observing system. The observing system will help satisfy the long-term requirements of operational forecast centers, international research programs, and the major scientific assessments, and effectively plan for and manage responses to climate change. NOAA has worked with both national and international partners to build this sustained global ocean system for climate. With the initial system design over 50% complete, the Office of Climate Observation\´s goal includes enhancing the subsystems of tide gauges, Argo profilers, drifting buoys, moored buoys, expendable bathythermographs, ocean reference stations, and ocean carbon measurements. Global coverage is anticipated by 2010. OCO-sponsored projects are predominately U.S. contributions to global networks coordinated through international science and implementation panels, and managed in cooperation with the Joint WMO/IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM). The Office of Climate Observation promotes the utilization of platform and data infrastructure for several objectives, including understanding the Earth\´s climate system, and documenting sea level change and the global carbon and water cycles. Although the focus of the Office of Climate Observation is to support projects that deploy autonomous in situ platforms, the overall objective is to foster a "system" approach to effective international organization of complementary in situ, satellite, data, and modeling components of climate observation. This presentation provides a view of the status of the global ocean observing system, a system that helps to develop a more robust understanding of sea level, carbon, heat, salinity, and air-sea exchange parameters