The REX Task Team has the responsibility of developing inter-comparisons among regional coastal marine ecosystems. Given that the long-term goal of the PICES CCCC Program being the application of models to understanding the influence of climate variability on plankton and fish production in the North Pacific, near-term goals are: (a) to learn more about the influence of climate variability on plankton production cycles, and (b) to determine if we can model the seasonal cycle of plankton production with the NEMURO model at many sites around the Pacific Rim.
At this workshop, we hope to locate as many site-specific studies
as possible, each with several years of observations for as many
boxes in the NEMURO lower tropic level model as is possible, in
order to facilitate model verification studies that must be conducted
in the future. Since NEMURO is an NPZ model, successful model<>data
comparisons will require data sets on temporal changes in light,
nutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton over (ideally) several
seasonal cycles. Although the long-term objective of the workshop
is to facilitate model-comparisons at many sites around the Pacific
Rim (including the Bering Sea), the proximate goal is to discuss
linkages and time lags between primary and secondary production
cycles; and where possible, the potential match-mismatch between
phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass cycles and the spawning and
growth of important fish species. If long time series are available,
we ask "How do interannual and decadal scale differences in the
timing of the spring bloom and other blooms affect zooplankton production
and fish spawning?". The possibility of publishing the results in
the Journal of Oceanography will be explored.