CAFE Project

Education and Outreach

The Project Team is developing educational activities with the goal of integrating:

• Farmers groups for understanding the potential uses and limitations of climate forecasts in their planning and decision-making activities.
• Regional agricultural planners for assisting the scientists to consider variables and time-windows that are actually useful, and to define ways for presenting research results that can be effectively assimilated in the farmers' and planners' activities.
• Regional scientists for testing and extending the remote sensing tools and methods of analysis (ENSO prediction, climate modeling, and agricultural and marine ecosystem models). LDEO forecasts are made available via Climate Diagnostic Bulletin and Experimental Long-Lead Forecast Bulletin. Historical analyses of the climate data will be made available to the public through LDEO web-based data library to the entire climate community.

The CAFE Project Website has been developed with the purpose of communicating scientific information and esetablishing an effective network among the project participants and collaborators.

Workshops

Applications of Climate Forecasting to Pelagic Fisheries, Noumea, New Caledonia — 6-24 November 2000

This workshop brought together some of the world's leading experts on climate variability, marine ecosystems, fisheries research and (fisheries) resource management. The overall theme of the workshop was to study how interannual variations in the climate system impact the various components of the marine ecosystem, especially pelagic and small pelagic fish stocks. Some highlights from the workshop lecture series included Andy Bakun discussing his red fish/blue fish idealization used to illustrate his school-mix feedback hypothesis, and Jürgen Alheit presenting evidence for a 1000-year correlation between Bohuslän Herring catch in Scandinavia and the severity of European winters (i.e., NAO index). A conceptual cornerstone for both of these talks, as well as the fundamental perception that fish stocks are directly connected to climate variability, is the observational evidence for worldwide, decadal-scale fluctuations in fish populations, termed global synchrony. A further concept that became a focal point of workshop research was the so-called ocean triad (enrichment, concentration and retention) that governs a given region's suitability for successful spawning.

All workshop participants were assigned the pre-meeting duty of acquiring pertinent data sets to be used to carryout research projects. To fulfill this obligation, Jerry Wiggert of ESSIC extracted the monthly SeaWiFS SMI-chlorophyll and created binary data files of the global distribution that could be accessed via Fortran programs on a Macintosh Powerbook. Having direct access to values of chlorophyll concentration, as opposed to the SeaWiFS imagery available on the web, allowed for precise quantitative assessment of chlorophyll variability for definable spatial regions as well as providing spatial distributions for a given time. The number of workshop participants (primarily fisheries researchers) that had no direct access to ocean color observations was, and is, surprising. However, it provided an excellent opportunity to provide ocean color observations and interpretation for a number of ocean regions while learning about each region's fisheries from local experts. These interactions are summarized in the included list of 'acknowledged contributions'. Related activities by Jerry Wiggert at the workshop illustrated a nice correspondence between mackerel catch/population distribution and the PDO. Consistent with the goals of the workshop, our co-sponsorship, and relevance to our CAFÉ activity, information was disseminated regarding the information needed to pursue the acquisition of ocean color observations from the Goddard/DAAC, in hopes that this would help motivate those with an active interest. Other highlights from the various regions covered by the workshop included an inverse catch/surface chlorophyll relation between the Moroccan Upwelling region and the Benguela Current system. This underscored the importance of retention (i.e., non-dispersive physical regimes) in successful maintenance of fish stocks and contributes to understanding the mystery behind the 90% reduction in estimated pilchard biomass in the northern Benguela from the mid-60s to today. Another highlight was the strong correspondence that is evident in tuna fish catch and ocean color distribution in the equatorial Indian Ocean in light of the anomalous 1997/1998 conditions and the subsequent return to normal conditions.

Acknowledged contributions:

Pelagic fisheries and environmental variability in the Southeast Asian seas

Penjan Rojana-anawat, Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center, Thailand

Bambang Sadhotomo, Research Institute for Marine Fisheries, Indonesia

Java Sea

Abdul Ghofar, Center for Coastal and Marine Research, Indonesia

The Bali Strait sardine fishery and climate variability

Abdul Ghofar, Center for Coastal and Marine Research, Indonesia

Namibian sardine fisheries and its interaction with environmental conditions

Anja Kreiner, National Marine Information and Research Centre, Namibia

Dawid Mouton, Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, Namibia

North Atlantic oscillation impact on primary productivity in the coastal Moroccan upwelling

Soukaina Zizah, Institut National de Recherche Halieutique, Morocco

Remote Sensing and El Niño Forecasting for Agriculture, Montevideo, Uruguay, 2002

This workshop will build on our efforts to understand ENSO impacts and help in their utilization in Uruguay. This workshop will focus on the use of remote sensing in ENSO prediction for agriculture. It involves the entire spectrum of scientists and end-users involved in this project, ranging from specialists in remote sensing indicating its useful for both climate and agricultural evaluation, to regional agricultural planners, and farming collectives who would benefit from this research.

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Components: ENSO, Climate, Marine, Vegetation
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