92
Michael J. McPhaden
several years during the formative stages of TAO. The challenge initially was then
to find enough time to do the work that two principal investigators previously had
done. Highly competent technical staff and a supportive scientific community helped
shorten the adjustment period, as did merging the ATLAS and current meter programs into a single unified program. Several of my colleagues and I also established
a TAO Implementation Panel (TIP) under sponsorship of TOGA to help coordinate
international contributions to the array.
The TAO array was completed in December 1994—the last month of TOGA—
when the Taiwanese R/V Ocean Researcher I deployed an ATLAS mooring at 8
◦ N,
156
◦ E (McPhaden, 1995). The array took the full 10 years of TOGA to complete, with
much of the growth occurring in the last 4 years of the program (Figure 6.2). Several
institutions in the United States, Japan, France, Taiwan, and South Korea provided
financial, technical, and logistic support. Full implementation required deployment
of 401 moorings and 5.7 years of ship time (83 research cruises using 17 different
ships from 6 different countries). When finished, TAO was called “the crowning
achievement of TOGA” (Carlowicz, 1997) and far exceeded in scope what had been
originally anticipated as a moored buoy component of TOGA (cf. Figures 6.1 and 6.2).
AFTER TOGA
TOGA achieved many of its research objectives thanks in large part to the synergy
between observations, modeling, and theory (National Research Council, 1996). Data
from the TOGA Observing System in particular fundamentally advanced our understanding of key oceanographic and meteorological processes involved in the ENSO
cycle (McPhaden et al., 1998), helped to foster advances in climate modeling (Stockdale et al., 1998) and ocean data assimilation systems (Anderson et al., 1996), and
provided data necessary for initializing and verifying ENSO predictions (Latif et al.,
1998). In many respects, completion of the TOGA Observing System was a milestone analogous to the establishment of the World Weather Watch in the early 1960s
to support numerical weather prediction (Davies, 1990).
It was recognized as early as the TOGA midlife review in 1990 that to critically evaluate the observing system for prediction purposes and to derive future benefit
from its establishment, it would have to be continued after TOGA. However, TAO and
other TOGA Observing System components had no guaranteed lifetime beyond the
end of the program that sponsored them. As TOGA neared its end, therefore, the issue
of sustaining the observing system became a matter of urgency. Several committees
weighed in with recommendations for continuation, including the TOGA Scientific
Steering Group (International TOGA Project Office, 1994) and the Ocean Observing
System Development Panel (OOSDP), which was charged by the Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO),
and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), to provide the conceptual
design for long-term systematic ocean observations in support of climate (OOSDP,
Michael J. McPhaden
several years during the formative stages of TAO. The challenge initially was then
to find enough time to do the work that two principal investigators previously had
done. Highly competent technical staff and a supportive scientific community helped
shorten the adjustment period, as did merging the ATLAS and current meter programs into a single unified program. Several of my colleagues and I also established
a TAO Implementation Panel (TIP) under sponsorship of TOGA to help coordinate
international contributions to the array.
The TAO array was completed in December 1994—the last month of TOGA—
when the Taiwanese R/V Ocean Researcher I deployed an ATLAS mooring at 8
◦ N,
156
◦ E (McPhaden, 1995). The array took the full 10 years of TOGA to complete, with
much of the growth occurring in the last 4 years of the program (Figure 6.2). Several
institutions in the United States, Japan, France, Taiwan, and South Korea provided
financial, technical, and logistic support. Full implementation required deployment
of 401 moorings and 5.7 years of ship time (83 research cruises using 17 different
ships from 6 different countries). When finished, TAO was called “the crowning
achievement of TOGA” (Carlowicz, 1997) and far exceeded in scope what had been
originally anticipated as a moored buoy component of TOGA (cf. Figures 6.1 and 6.2).
AFTER TOGA
TOGA achieved many of its research objectives thanks in large part to the synergy
between observations, modeling, and theory (National Research Council, 1996). Data
from the TOGA Observing System in particular fundamentally advanced our understanding of key oceanographic and meteorological processes involved in the ENSO
cycle (McPhaden et al., 1998), helped to foster advances in climate modeling (Stockdale et al., 1998) and ocean data assimilation systems (Anderson et al., 1996), and
provided data necessary for initializing and verifying ENSO predictions (Latif et al.,
1998). In many respects, completion of the TOGA Observing System was a milestone analogous to the establishment of the World Weather Watch in the early 1960s
to support numerical weather prediction (Davies, 1990).
It was recognized as early as the TOGA midlife review in 1990 that to critically evaluate the observing system for prediction purposes and to derive future benefit
from its establishment, it would have to be continued after TOGA. However, TAO and
other TOGA Observing System components had no guaranteed lifetime beyond the
end of the program that sponsored them. As TOGA neared its end, therefore, the issue
of sustaining the observing system became a matter of urgency. Several committees
weighed in with recommendations for continuation, including the TOGA Scientific
Steering Group (International TOGA Project Office, 1994) and the Ocean Observing
System Development Panel (OOSDP), which was charged by the Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO),
and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), to provide the conceptual
design for long-term systematic ocean observations in support of climate (OOSDP,