World Ocean Circulation Experiment
189
PROPOSING IT AND SELLING IT
In any event, with the sense that we could develop adequate technologies in a reasonably brief time period, that models would probably improve independent of any
field program, and that we knew generally what needed to be done, I proposed at
the Miami meeting that there should be an attempt to measure the ocean circulation
and its variability, globally, as the oceanographic contribution to understanding the
climate state. R. Stewart (Canada) made another specific suggestion: that it would be
useful to attempt to formulate a complete, closed heat budget of the North Atlantic
Ocean sector, including both atmosphere and ocean as a trial experiment for a possible
later global one. Some combination of in situ observations of ocean and atmosphere,
along with coupled models would be used to understand how heat was transported
by both fluids, and how it was transferred between them. At some point, Stewart’s
proposal was labelled the “CAGE” experiment, as it would basically involve building
a cage around the North Atlantic basin in both atmosphere and ocean. In response to
the two proposals made at the Miami meeting, the CCCO appointed two Committees: one was chaired by Fred Dobson (Bedford Institute) to examine the prospects
for CAGE; the other was chaired by Francis Bretherton (then Director of NCAR) to
examine the prospects of a global experiment. The report of the CAGE committee
(Dobson et al., 1982) was very impressive and came to a startling conclusion—that
CAGE was impractical, not because of the problems of observing the ocean, but because atmospheric measurements were inadequate to close the atmospheric side of
the heat budget!
6 This wholly unexpected conclusion effectively left the global ocean
experiment alone as a serious proposal (“ . . . the concept of a North Atlantic CAGE
experiment lies battered and torn, . . . ” from a letter of F. Dobson to the Committee
on Climate Change and the Ocean, January 10, 1983).
Another, completely separate, program ultimately called TOGA (Tropical
Ocean, Global Atmosphere) was being formulated and organized. TOGA has been
described at length elsewhere (see Halpern, 1996, for a discussion of its origins).
Suffice it to say that its flavor was very different, involving as it did a very large meteorological component, a goal of forecasting, and a hard insistence that only the upper
few hundred meters of the near-equatorial ocean had to be understood in order to
achieve its goals. The latter point of view, in particular, ultimately caused difficulties
for what became WOCE.
The Bretherton committee, studying the option of a global ocean circulation
program, eventually concluded that it might be feasible, and recommended that serious
planning and study should begin.
That, of course, was when our real troubles started. The job was to organize something both nationally (the U.S. contribution was clearly going to be the
dominant one) and internationally, on a scale never before tried by oceanographers,
6 Much of the difficulty lay with the problem of calibrating radiosondes, whose offsets prevented the
possibility of closing the atmospheric budget.
189
PROPOSING IT AND SELLING IT
In any event, with the sense that we could develop adequate technologies in a reasonably brief time period, that models would probably improve independent of any
field program, and that we knew generally what needed to be done, I proposed at
the Miami meeting that there should be an attempt to measure the ocean circulation
and its variability, globally, as the oceanographic contribution to understanding the
climate state. R. Stewart (Canada) made another specific suggestion: that it would be
useful to attempt to formulate a complete, closed heat budget of the North Atlantic
Ocean sector, including both atmosphere and ocean as a trial experiment for a possible
later global one. Some combination of in situ observations of ocean and atmosphere,
along with coupled models would be used to understand how heat was transported
by both fluids, and how it was transferred between them. At some point, Stewart’s
proposal was labelled the “CAGE” experiment, as it would basically involve building
a cage around the North Atlantic basin in both atmosphere and ocean. In response to
the two proposals made at the Miami meeting, the CCCO appointed two Committees: one was chaired by Fred Dobson (Bedford Institute) to examine the prospects
for CAGE; the other was chaired by Francis Bretherton (then Director of NCAR) to
examine the prospects of a global experiment. The report of the CAGE committee
(Dobson et al., 1982) was very impressive and came to a startling conclusion—that
CAGE was impractical, not because of the problems of observing the ocean, but because atmospheric measurements were inadequate to close the atmospheric side of
the heat budget!
6 This wholly unexpected conclusion effectively left the global ocean
experiment alone as a serious proposal (“ . . . the concept of a North Atlantic CAGE
experiment lies battered and torn, . . . ” from a letter of F. Dobson to the Committee
on Climate Change and the Ocean, January 10, 1983).
Another, completely separate, program ultimately called TOGA (Tropical
Ocean, Global Atmosphere) was being formulated and organized. TOGA has been
described at length elsewhere (see Halpern, 1996, for a discussion of its origins).
Suffice it to say that its flavor was very different, involving as it did a very large meteorological component, a goal of forecasting, and a hard insistence that only the upper
few hundred meters of the near-equatorial ocean had to be understood in order to
achieve its goals. The latter point of view, in particular, ultimately caused difficulties
for what became WOCE.
The Bretherton committee, studying the option of a global ocean circulation
program, eventually concluded that it might be feasible, and recommended that serious
planning and study should begin.
That, of course, was when our real troubles started. The job was to organize something both nationally (the U.S. contribution was clearly going to be the
dominant one) and internationally, on a scale never before tried by oceanographers,
6 Much of the difficulty lay with the problem of calibrating radiosondes, whose offsets prevented the
possibility of closing the atmospheric budget.