Thanks to eveyone who joined us at AGU for our Town Hall Tuesday! We had a great crowd and audience response to the preview of the new U.S. CLIVAR Science Plan under development.  Click here to download the Town Hall Presentation. 

Our ENSO Diversity Working Group just wrapped up a successful workshop that included over 40 presentations by scientists studying all aspects of ENSO Diversity.  Abstracts, presentations, and the complete workshop report are now available to download at the workshop webpage. 

The latest edition of the U.S. CLIVAR Variations newsletter is now available to view/download.  You may notice a slight change in format as we are now publishing the newsletter exclusively online.  Please subscribe to Variations here on our website to receive email notification of future editions.

Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS) has launched the R/V Knorr from Woods Hole, MA for a six-week cruise through a high-salinity region of the Atlantic Ocean. Dr. Eric Lindstrom, project scientist for NASA’s Physical Oceanography program and member of U.S. CLIVAR's Inter-Agency Group, is on board the R/V Knorr.  Follow along with the research cruise through Lindstrom's SPURS blog.  

Members of the U.S. CLIVAR Working Group on Decadal Predictability have just published a paper in Climate Dynamics entitled “A verification framework for interannual-to-decadal prediction experiments.”  The paper presents consistent metrics for evaluating forecast quality across predictions systems, and guidance on the use of model predictions including correction of mean and conditional biases, and consideration of how best to approach forecast uncertainty.

NOAA's Climate Program Office has announced its FY 2013 federal funding opportunity. The full announcement of opportunity is available on the CPO Funding Opportunities page and on the Grants.Gov website.  In FY 2013, NOAA will accept individual applications for 7 competitions, organized around the following programs: Earth System Science; Modeling Analysis, Predictions, and Projections; and Climate and Societal Interactions.  Letters of intent are due 5 p.m. (ET), Aug. 29, 2012, and the deadline for final applications is 5:00 p.m. (ET), Nov. 6, 2012.

The US CLIVAR SSC & Lead Authors are currently editing the new US CLIVAR Science Plan based on the comments received during the public review. The public release of the final Science Plan is scheduled for December 2013 with Town Halls planned at the AGU Fall 2013 and Ocean Sciences 2014 meetings.

The 2012 U.S. AMOC PI Meeting was held August 15-17 in Boulder, Colorado.  This was an open meeting for U.S. AMOC Principal Investigators and all interested parties to review current research and examine near-term priorities in four topical areas: The AMOC Observing System, AMOC fingerprinting from historical and proxy data, AMOC mechanisms and predictability, and AMOC's impact on the carbon cycle.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has launched the Climate Data Guide Website. The NSF-funded Climate Data Guide, produced by NCAR's Climate Analysis Section, enables researchers, students and stakeholders worldwide to search for data sets used in climate analysis and model evaluation, learn about data sets' strengths and limitations from expert-users and share expertise and advice on data sets.

The five new U.S. CLIVAR Working Groups (WG) include the Eastern Tropical Ocean Synthesis WG, the ENSO Diversity WG, the Extremes WG, as well as two working groups co-sponsored with the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program: the Ocean Carbon Uptake WG, and the Southern Ocean WG.