The Cooperative Institute for Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Systems (CIMEAS) will facilitate and enhance research collaboration between NOAA scientists and partners at the University of California, California State Universities, and at the Farallon Institute. The overall scientific and practical goals of CIMEAS projects are to understand the coupled ocean, atmosphere, land, and ecosystem variability and assess the physical and biological state of the global and regional oceans in service of NOAA’s mission to manage marine resources and serve and inform the US public.The overarching vision and goals of CIMEAS are completely aligned with those of NOAA, although our reach is primarily regional, in the Pacific, Southern Ocean, and US West Coast.
All CIMEAS expertise, facilities, and capabilities are meant to address these goals. NOAA’s ocean, atmosphere, and Earth system capabilities are integral to our planned projects, and we aim to evolve our observations, observing systems, technology, models, and understanding to enhance NOAA’s capabilities in the areas of our four themes:
- Science to support ecosystem-based management of living marine resources
- Research, development and technology innovation for global ocean observations and monitoring
- Coastal and oceanic observations, analysis and prediction
- Weather, water and climate research
Challenge
We are at the start of a transformational era in earth systems science. It has long been understood that the ocean, atmosphere, land, and their natural and human systems are coupled together, but we have not until recently had the observations and the simulation capability to start to understand and predict the total system quantitatively and reliably. These newly expanded and capable observations and models will bring exciting new advances to our ability to forecast physical, and someday ecosystem and human variables for a more sustainable and resilient society and world.
An example is Argo profiling floats and satellites measuring changes in near-surface salinity globally to reveal the time-varying balance of evaporation and rainfall. The ocean integrates the atmospheric forcing and so it can provide a powerful source of observations for testing and improving weather and climate models. Ecosystems are very sensitive to fine-scale details of the ocean and atmosphere, like vertical velocity or precipitation, and so observations of ecosystem variables can potentially feed back into knowledge of the physical variables as well as form the basis for improved predictions.
On the other hand, the mechanisms of the coupling and of the systems themselves are nonlinear and have many degrees of freedom, challenging observers and modelers to find ways to improve our understanding, prediction, and management capabilities. Even the seemingly simple Sea Surface Temperature (SST) fields that are routinely produced by NOAA are the result of complicated processes integrating instantaneous atmospheric forcing, turbulent mixing, and advection to the extent that even our best observing systems still cannot provide unambiguous measures of even integrated quantities like upper ocean heat content, which is critical to weather and climate.
Meteorology is the most advanced example of the paradigm that we aspire to. Observations are used to initialize model runs for predictions. The difference between predictions and reality highlight model errors and biases that are addressed by new model, sensor, platform, and observing strategy development to improve predictability going forward. Each forecast quantitively represents a hypothesis for the atmospheric state and dynamics and the verification of that forecast against observations tests the hypothesis and highlights the discrepancies that give information either about uncertainties in the system or about biases to be corrected. We aim to apply this approach to the whole earth system, although the modeling challenges are tremendous.
Vision
The vision for CIMEAS is that the theory, observations, and modeling work together in the scientific process to continually improve our understanding of the Earth system. As in weather, observations will be compared to existing models and the discrepancies will be addressed by theory to improve the models. The models will suggest where and what to observe to continue the cycle of improvement. Observations are the key to increased understanding because of the complications of the problem. Each level of coupling increases the complexity. While the physics of the ocean and atmosphere is complicated and nonlinear, the biogeochemical systems have a huge number of processes, most with less-developed theory, and ecosystem modeling is still searching for the best modeling approaches. For all systems, theory is needed to guide us in a path forward. The solution may lie in dynamical modeling, data-driven machine learning, or a hybrid approach, but observations are the foundation for suggesting and falsifying hypotheses (meaning models).
Supporting ecosystem-based management of living marine resources is arguably the most challenging theme, because all the other themes and science come into play. The physical ocean state and the atmosphere interact and force each other, precipitation on land comes back to the ocean as runoff and exchanges in estuaries and at the coast, the nutrients delivered by the flows spar primary production which in turn drives the food web up to top predators and humans.
Collaboration
We will be fully collaborative with NOAA in this process of understanding, with our people, observations, theory, and modeling progress shared with NOAA, the US, and the international scientific enterprise. Observation networks are most effective when they are international and collaborative and the same is true for Earth science in general. The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 is an example of the international collaboration that we intend to participate in, but our focus is not confined to the ocean. The earth system is coupled as well as global, but it is a sometimes-necessary compromise to consider parts of it in isolation. The global observing system is an inherently collaborative Enterprise, and the Argo project has been a leader in this aspect, bringing many countries together to join with a US-led effort to make transformative measurements of the global oceans that are not limited by exclusive economic zones and national boundaries. Just as atmosphere and ocean pollution does not respect international boundaries, neither does the flow of information and influence in the ocean and atmosphere. Upstream observations are critical to weather forecasting and NOAA has anchored an international network of observations with shared data. NOAA is maintaining this network and this collaboration in the atmosphere, and Argo and the other ocean observation programs are emulating that in the ocean.
We have chosen our consortium academic institutions and supporting research affiliate for the expertise, facilities, and capabilities they bring to the problem, as detailed below, and for the diversity they bring to NOAA’s potential workforce. Even though NOAA has yet to access the scientific expertise at some of these institutions, the education and outreach funds that come as part of the Cooperative Institute will help us combine forces and use the cooperative institute as a framework for exchanging students for better exposure to the academic science and to NOAA’s Earth system scientific enterprise.
Our observing and modeling efforts are embedded in the NOAA global analysis and prediction system. We will evaluate the impact of our observations doing observing system experiments and observing system simulation experiments within these analysis and prediction systems as much as possible. UC Santa Cruz has advanced capability to evaluate the impact of observations on the analyses and forecasts and this is an invaluable tool to transition to NOAA for the design of future observing systems.