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FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN OCEAN SCIENCES 55 



not yet defined or collected routinely. The scientific and techno- 

 logical results from several ongoing large-scale research programs — 

 the Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere program, the World Ocean 

 Circulation Experiment (WOCE), and the Joint Global Ocean Flux 

 Study — should be used to design an operational observation sys- 

 tem that is effective, affordable, and consistent with our knowl- 

 edge of the scales of ocean biology, chemistry, and physics. It 

 would be the largest field enterprise ever undertaken by the oceano- 

 graphic community, and it must have an international and 

 multidisciplinary scope well beyond previous experience. The 

 design and implementation of a global ocean observing system 

 (GOOS) must involve ocean scientists substantially because the 

 design is extremely important to the science itself and depends on 

 firm scientific understanding. Designing and deploying a GOOS 

 is one of the most im.portant and difficult tasks for physical ocean- 

 ography and climate studies in the next decade. The United States 

 should take a major leadership role in both the research and the 

 operations. 



Because of the present paucity of ocean data, numerical mod- 

 els are important in the development of a GOOS. Models will be 

 used to interpret available data for testing possible system designs 

 and, ultimately, to interpret the data from such a system. 



Major Research Topics for the Coming Decade 



Several topics will dominate physical oceanographic research 

 in the coming decade. The list is incomplete,- the topics men- 

 tioned received some emphasis during the Ocean Studies Board 

 workshops as representing key research issues and include the 

 following: research in modeling; ocean mixing, including interior 

 mixing and the surface mixed layer,- thermohaline circulation,- and 

 heat and freshwater fluxes. 



Ocean Modeling 



The central focus of numerical modeling of the ocean has been, 

 and continues to be, directed toward fluid dynamics, but the mod- 

 els have importance far beyond physical oceanography. For ex- 

 ample, communities of organisms in the upper ocean live in a 

 delicate balance, depending on the stability of the water column, 

 its mixing rates, and its large-scale vertical and horizontal fluid 

 movements. Our limited ability to predict the movements of the 

 upper ocean limits understanding of basic biological processes. 



