The Hindu Business Line : Network to monitor Indian Ocean

THE Indian Ocean will host an observation network to monitor ocean currents and temperature conditions that bring rain and drought to nearly two-thirds of the world's population.

Work is apace on a project that is going to become as relevant and important to the wheat farmers of Western Australia as it will be to rice growers in India or Indonesia, says Dr Gary Meyers of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Nine deep ocean moorings (of instruments) are already in place courtesy investments by the US, Japan and India. Further mooring is being considered in a joint arrangement between Australia and China.

Dr Meyers recently hosted the international Indian Ocean Panel at a coordination and planning meeting involving climate scientists from eight countries.

The Indian Ocean Panel is a permanent body jointly sponsored by the World Climate Research Programme's CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Predictability) project on forecasting, and the inter- governmental Oceanographic Commission's Global Ocean Observing System.

The climate network shares some common elements with an Indian Ocean basin warning system for tsunami and other marine hazards such as tropical cyclones and storm surge. All these natural events have in the past caused great damage to the people living on the rim of the Indian Ocean.

Dr Meyers said the recent discovery of El Nino-like phenomena in the Indian Ocean has highlighted the importance of regional data collection to understand and predict seasonal and longer-term climate variability over all the surrounding continents.

Among these are:

The Indian Ocean Dipole, a fluctuation of surface temperature and currents that brings drought to Indonesia and heavy rain to semiarid regions of Africa. The Dipole is simultaneously related to deficit of rainfall as far away as southeastern Australia.

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), a weather pattern that evolves for as long as four weeks and that interacts strongly with the surface layer of the ocean. It originates over the Indian Ocean and impacts on Asian and Australian rainfalls, US west coast weather, tropical Atlantic hurricane formation, and occasionally affects the evolution of the El Nino Southern Oscillation.

The Indian Ocean has warmed rapidly in the last 30 years and its effects have been tracked to the North Atlantic Oscillation and the African Sahel rainfall (marked by year to year and decadal time scale variability).

Dr Meyers said Australian science has considerable experience in ocean monitoring through its present involvement in international research programmes.

It has initiated a regional ocean watch system using commercial shipping to monitor subsurface ocean temperature, built a network of tide gauges in the Pacific, and piloted the Argo ocean profiling programme between in the eastern Indian and Southern Oceans.

Elements of a basin-wide observing network are already in place and generating valuable ocean data. Through satellites, US and Japanese scientists are obtaining information from some of the moorings within 24 hours of recordings. These data are made available to climate modelling and prediction centres around the world.

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