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and services offered to the Nation's ocean users. 



NOAA is improving the accuracy of short-term warnings and weather 

 forecasts. For example, NOAA recently inaugurated a new 

 hurricane forecast model that it has been developing for several 

 years. The model is expected to save lives and property for many 

 years to come. NOAA is working to implement seasonal and inter- 

 annual climate forecasting. For example, data from a new 

 monitoring system in the Pacific Ocean will detect El Nino events 

 and permit seasonal forecasts of its effects. NOAA is 

 contributing to achieve a prediction capability for decadal and 

 even centennial climate change. 



The recently completed Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) 

 project has increased our understanding of seasonal and inter- 

 annual climate variability. NOAA was a major participant in 

 TOGA, which focused on the tropical Pacific Ocean and which 

 bequeathed a monitoring network, known as the Tropical Atmosphere 

 Ocean (TAO) array. The TAO array is composed of 69 deep-moored 

 buoys which span one-third of earth's circumference, across the 

 tropical Pacific from 95 degrees west to 137 degrees east 

 longitude. NOAA will lead the project to maintain the TAO 

 monitoring array, with participation by Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and 

 France . 



Data from the TAO array will give early warning of El Nino 

 events, and will be used in models that have shown predictive 

 capability beyond the tropical Pacific Ocean. For example, 

 recent heavy rains in California and the southeastern 

 United States are largely explicable as an ancillary effect of El 

 Nino/Southern Oscillation - the east-west movement over a period 

 of years of warm surface water between Indonesia and Peru. To 

 derive maximum benefit from continued operation of the TAO array, 

 improvements must be realized in the predictive capability beyond 

 the tropical Pacific. Toward this end, NOAA is working at its 

 Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in conjunction with 

 Princeton University and some other federal and international 

 groups that also do environmental modeling. NOAA will also 

 participate in the follow-on Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System 

 (GOALS) study, undertaken as part of the Climate Variability and 

 Predictability Programme of the World Climate Research Programme. 

 On the larger time scales, NOAA is involved in the World Ocean 

 Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Joint Global Ocean Flux 

 Study (JGOFS) . 



WOCE 



The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) is a multi-national 

 effort that will last until 1997. WOCE is designed to learn 

 about large-scale circulation and long-term changes in the ocean. 

 While it is known that the ocean and the atmosphere interact 



