The Marine Working Group of IASC participated in the 19th Annual Meeting of POGO, held at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego, USA on 23-25 January 2018. POGO is an international consortium of the world’s major oceanographic research institutes, whose vision is to achieve, by 2030, world-wide cooperation for a sustainable, state-of-the-art global ocean observing system that serves the needs of science and society.
The goal of the invited participation was to exchange information between the two science planning and coordination groups in order to provide IASC and the MWG the opportunity to explore the potential for better working collaborations and coordination of activities between IASC and POGO. During the last few years, POGO has held dedicated workshops on Arctic observations during their annual meeting, and this year, to improve the engagement of POGO with the Arctic Ocean observing community, the IASC MWG was invited to participate more formally.
Tom Armitage (MWG Fellow 2017) attended, giving a broad presentation on the mission, structure and research priorities of IASC and the MWG, and he helped to inform discussion among POGO meeting participants on how best to further POGOs interests in Arctic ocean observing science through IASC. One outcome is that a POGO representative will be invited to the next MWG business meeting in Davos, Switzerland to continue those discussions and develop better coordination for international science research planning on ocean observations in the Arctic.