Summary of the Joint Workshop of the DV-WG, HL-TAG, ST-VAL, and EARWiG on Tropical Warm Pool and High Latitude SST Issues

The successful workshop was held at the Bureau of Meteorology Head Office, Melbourne, Australia, Monday 5th – Friday 9th March 2012. Thanks are due to the excellent organization of Helen Beggs (Joint Workshop organizer), Gary Wick (Chair of the DV-WG), Jacob Hoeyer (Chair of the HL-TAG), Gary Corlett (Chair of the ST-VAL), Andy Harris (Chair of EARWiG) and Chris Merchant (Chair of CDR-TAG).

It was scientifically a very stimulating meeting. Two days of plenary sessions were followed by two days of collaboration on identified issues by sharing data, code and ideas, and a final day for drawing conclusions and for determining the next actions. The main contributions came from the GHRSST groups DVWG and HL-TAG, with cross-cutting input from EARWiG, ST-VAL and CDR-TAG.

The aim of the workshop was to achieve progress with the observed and modelled sea surface temperatures (SST) for two regions - the Tropical Warm Pool and high latitudes (particularly in the SH). The Tropical Warm Pool (TWP) region is located in the western tropical Pacific Ocean and the eastern tropical Indian Ocean. Here the ocean shows the highest SST variation per unit area and is one of the most difficult areas to retrieve and validate SST. This is due to a combination of high water vapour amounts, large diurnal warming, frequent cloud cover reducing the amount of SST retrievals from infrared satellite sensors, island chains reducing the spatial coverage of SST from microwave satellite sensors, and a lack of quality in situ SST measurements. The High Latitudes (covering the Southern and Arctic Oceans) are challenging regions for measuring SST due to a combination of prolonged cloud cover, large atmospheric variability, variations in sea-ice cover, frontal regions causing high spatial and temporal variability in SST, and a lack of quality in situ SST observations for calibration and validation.