There are, however, many other types of 

 exchanges between oceans and atmosphere, some 

 exceedingly subtle in their requirements for obser- 

 vations, all of which need to be studied in detail. 

 Energy is- transferred from wind to ocean as 

 kinetic energy of waves and currents, and although 

 techniques are available for forecasting the ocean 

 surface waves and currents resulting from inter- 

 action with a wind field, they are still semi- 

 empirical. Non-linearity of the interactions, and 

 the stochastic nature of the processes involved, 

 make wholly theoretical solutions extremely dif- 

 ficult to formulate. 



Severe storms, particularly tropical hurricanes, 

 may greatly modify the ocean layers over which 

 they pass, mixing the surface layers to produce 

 profound temperature and salinity changes. Con- 

 versely, tropical hurricanes are generated solely 

 over the ocean surface and deteriorate rapidly over 

 colder water or land. 



Solid particles are likewise exchanged between 

 the sea surface and the atmosphere. Solid nuclei 

 play important roles in cloud physics, and their 

 absence may be a limiting factor controlling 

 precipitation. Some of these nuclei originate from 

 salt spray; other atmospheric particles originating 

 as terrestrial or cosmic dust form a significant 

 fraction of pelagic oceanic sediments. 



Gases interchanged between the atmosphere 

 and the sea surface form still another category of 

 material involved in air-sea interaction. A detect- 

 able secular increase of atmospheric carbon 

 dioxide has been traced to industrial combustion 

 of coal and petroleum, raising the question of 

 what effect this might have on the dissolved 

 carbon dioxide content of the ocean. 



A broad attack on the theoretical and tech- 

 nological problems of providing adequate world 

 wide meteorological information is now being 

 planned and coordinated by the World Meteoro- 

 logical Organization under the designation of the 

 World Weather Program.^" As part of this activity, 

 undertaken jointly with the International Union of 

 Geodesy and Geophysics and the Intergovern- 

 mental Oceanographic Commission, the World 

 Meteorological Organization is planning a Global 

 Atmospheric Research Program. The Intergovern- 



mental Oceanographic Commission is embarked 

 upon an "Integrated Global Ocean Station 

 System" which is the ocean analogue of the World 

 Weather Program. Both of these programs call for 

 a much expanded effort to understand the inter- 

 action between the ocean and the atmosphere. 



Parallel activity is being initiated by all in- 

 terested agencies of the United States Government 

 and university groups. The first series of com- 

 prehensive sea-air interaction field experiments 

 are scheduled for the summer of 1969 off 

 Barbados.^' 



Critical importance attaches to the understand- 

 ing of the interaction between ocean and atmos- 

 phere, on the one hand for predicting the state of 

 the oceans and on the other for predicting the 

 state of the atmosphere. 



Recommendation : 



The Nation should continue to place a high 

 priority on comprehensive field experiments to 

 understand air-sea interaction processes. 



B. Dynamics of Ocean Currents 



Ocean currents may be superficially likened to 

 the winds of the atmosphere, but except for the 

 trade winds they are significantly different in their 

 persistence and behavior. In the temperate and 

 polar regions of the earth, regions of low pressure 

 tend to drift from west to east around the earth, 

 bringing with them weather patterns that com- 

 monly persist only for a few days. The wind at any 

 given locality in these regions may blow north for 

 several days, and south for the following days. 

 Ocean current systems, at least on an oceanic 

 scale, persist season after season in the same 

 geographical areas. The meridional advection of 

 heat by these persistent ocean currents has far- 

 reaching effects on climate and fluctuations in the 

 transport of these current systems are very Kkely 

 one of the main causes of variations in average 

 temperature, rainfall, and other meteorological 

 characteristics of most of the earth's surface. 



World Weather Watch-the Plan and Implementation 

 Programme, World Meteorological Organization, May 

 1967. 



Plan For a Major Field Experiment in Support of the 

 Federal Air-Sea Interaction Program, Report to the Joint 

 ICO/ICAS Panel on Air-Sea Interaction by the Sea-Air 

 Interaction Laboratory, Institute of Oceanography, U.S. 

 Environmental Science Services Administration, March 

 1967. 



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