192
Carl Wunsch
It was finally concluded that a separate program, which became JGOFS, should
be spun-off into the hands of the requisite experts, with a commitment (which was
honored) for WOCE to provide shiptime and to generally collaborate. With hindsight,
this decision was the right one, with WMB focussing his unhappiness primarily on
the JGOFS organizers, not WOCE (but see Kerr, 1991).
Organizing national and international programs is a huge time sink. We took
as the principle that coordination would be attempted only if was really required—
because temporal simultaneity was essential. For example, important as modelling
would be to WOCE, it did not require the same degree of international organization
that the observational programs did. To a large degree, the modelling community
was advancing with the growing computer power—a development that was out of
the hands of oceanographers. They were already reasonably well-organized internationally, having periodic meetings that brought the main players together. A policy
of “benign neglect” seemed to be appropriate, and seems to have worked reasonably
well, although inevitably, some of that community chose to infer that WOCE was antimodelling. The most conspicuous WOCE modelling program was the community
effort led by C. B¨ oning, W. Holland, and others (the WOCE modeling effort was
reviewed by B¨ oning and Semtner, 2001).
A few of the major strategic debates stand out. One was the conflict between
those who believed that the major issues of physical oceanography and climate lay
with the inability to parametrize processes in the models, and those advocating a global
quantitative description of the circulation. Thus, a strong community wished to deploy
the majority of WOCE observational resources into a single ocean basin (there were
advocates for the North Atlantic and the North Pacific). WOCE did endorse and carry
out a number of regional process-oriented experiments, most notably the so-called
Subduction Experiment in the eastern North Atlantic, and the Brazil Basin Experiment
in the South Atlantic, but some of the fiercer advocates of what was sometimes called
“model testing” declined further participation in the program. Another complication
was the organizational separation of the Subduction Experiment from WOCE because
the U.S. Office of Naval Research was interested in funding it, but did not want to be
attached in any way to a program that was publicly directed at understanding climate.
Overall, the WOCE organizers generally succeeded in maintaining the globalscale, deep-water, measurement focus which had underlain the initial proposals for
the program. Other specific regions had powerful proponents (high-latitude marginal
seas, the Mediterranean, and so on) who simply could not be accommodated with the
resources (human and observational) that were likely to be available. With hindsight, it
is clear that the global ocean is so complex, with so many different dynamical regimes,
and time and space scales, that few individuals are comfortable with discussions of
the system as a whole. Most scientists focus their attention on particular processes, or
ocean basins, and the global scale tends to be an orphan. That WOCE did not break
up into a series of regional programs was one of the great accomplishments of the
various steering committees. (Some of the ongoing travails of the successor CLIVAR
can be understood in this context.)
Carl Wunsch
It was finally concluded that a separate program, which became JGOFS, should
be spun-off into the hands of the requisite experts, with a commitment (which was
honored) for WOCE to provide shiptime and to generally collaborate. With hindsight,
this decision was the right one, with WMB focussing his unhappiness primarily on
the JGOFS organizers, not WOCE (but see Kerr, 1991).
Organizing national and international programs is a huge time sink. We took
as the principle that coordination would be attempted only if was really required—
because temporal simultaneity was essential. For example, important as modelling
would be to WOCE, it did not require the same degree of international organization
that the observational programs did. To a large degree, the modelling community
was advancing with the growing computer power—a development that was out of
the hands of oceanographers. They were already reasonably well-organized internationally, having periodic meetings that brought the main players together. A policy
of “benign neglect” seemed to be appropriate, and seems to have worked reasonably
well, although inevitably, some of that community chose to infer that WOCE was antimodelling. The most conspicuous WOCE modelling program was the community
effort led by C. B¨ oning, W. Holland, and others (the WOCE modeling effort was
reviewed by B¨ oning and Semtner, 2001).
A few of the major strategic debates stand out. One was the conflict between
those who believed that the major issues of physical oceanography and climate lay
with the inability to parametrize processes in the models, and those advocating a global
quantitative description of the circulation. Thus, a strong community wished to deploy
the majority of WOCE observational resources into a single ocean basin (there were
advocates for the North Atlantic and the North Pacific). WOCE did endorse and carry
out a number of regional process-oriented experiments, most notably the so-called
Subduction Experiment in the eastern North Atlantic, and the Brazil Basin Experiment
in the South Atlantic, but some of the fiercer advocates of what was sometimes called
“model testing” declined further participation in the program. Another complication
was the organizational separation of the Subduction Experiment from WOCE because
the U.S. Office of Naval Research was interested in funding it, but did not want to be
attached in any way to a program that was publicly directed at understanding climate.
Overall, the WOCE organizers generally succeeded in maintaining the globalscale, deep-water, measurement focus which had underlain the initial proposals for
the program. Other specific regions had powerful proponents (high-latitude marginal
seas, the Mediterranean, and so on) who simply could not be accommodated with the
resources (human and observational) that were likely to be available. With hindsight, it
is clear that the global ocean is so complex, with so many different dynamical regimes,
and time and space scales, that few individuals are comfortable with discussions of
the system as a whole. Most scientists focus their attention on particular processes, or
ocean basins, and the global scale tends to be an orphan. That WOCE did not break
up into a series of regional programs was one of the great accomplishments of the
various steering committees. (Some of the ongoing travails of the successor CLIVAR
can be understood in this context.)