Extracting the broader lessons concerning climate impacts on marine ecosystems from regional studies in the Northwest Atlantic, Northeast Pacific, and Southern Ocean will be the central challenge facing U.S. GLOBEC researchers as field work is completed and synthesis efforts within each region are undertaken. U.S. GLOBEC process studies will be completed in 2002 in the California Current System and in the Southern Ocean, and in 2003 in the Coastal Gulf of Alaska. Synthesis efforts are now underway for the Georges Bank program and will be initiated in the Northeast Pacific and Southern Ocean programs following completion of field efforts (Figure 1). A higher-order synthesis effort incorporating basin-scale modeling efforts and comparative analyses among U.S. GLOBEC studies and related programs is then planned to meet the overarching GLOBEC goal of predicting the effects of global climate change on marine ecosystems.

Fogarty, M.J. 2002. The challenges ahead. Oceanography 15(2):87–89, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2002.24.

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