Participants of the Workshop (photo by S. Behera).

The EU-Japan Ad-Hoc Workshop on Climate Modeling was held at the Institute for Global Change Research (IGCR), the main research site of the Frontier Resrach System for Global Change (FRSGC) located in the campus of JAMSTEC Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences (YES), Japan from September 17th to 19th, 2002. The workshop was jointly convened by senior researchers from both Japan and EU.

This workshop started with welcome address by T. Matsuno, the Director-General of FRSGC. During the first day of the workshop, there were 16 talks by researchers from both EU and Japan under three different sessions. In these talks, the researchers highlighted three important issues; scientific background of the modeling effort, modeling scenario in the Earth Simulator (currently the fastest vector parallel computer in the world) and future modeling studies. These presentations were well received by the audience of about 33.

Discussion on identification of the themes for collaboration

During the second day of the workshop, research themes for the successful collaboration between EU and Japan were discussed. Researchers identified several important themes for the collaboration: Monsoon, El Nino and Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), teleconnections of both IOD and ENSO, intra-seasonal disturbances and scale interactions, ocean data assimilation and seasonal forecast. Those themes will be addressed by conducting high-resolution coupled General Circulations Model (GCM) experiments on the Earth Simulator.

Specific issues related to the successful collaboration were discussed on the third day of the workshop. Paris (France) has been decided as the next venue for the forthcoming EU-Japan meeting. The three day workshop was adjourned by T. Yamagata, the program director of Climate Variations Research Program of FRSGC, with his closing remarks.