The Second Report has been released as of May 2019. The Executive Summary is currently available in English; translated versions will be posted when they are available. It will be translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.
The Second Report builds off the First Report; it covers new areas of review, expands on areas that were not adequately covered in the First Report and provides additional detail of the Backbone observing system. Progress with implementation and the pathway to bring new technology into the Backbone are also discussed.
Tropical Pacific Observing System
Download full report here.
This Second Report of the Tropical Pacific Observing System 2020 Project (TPOS 20201)
builds on the analysis and conclusions of the First Report, informed by new evidence and/or
fresh perspectives on priorities. The report provides further elaboration and refinement of the
recommendations and updated or new actions where appropriate, together with additional detail
and recommendations in areas not covered in the initial report. Recommendations for a
redesigned moored array, that remained fuzzy in the First Report, are now detailed.
This Second Report provides a major revision and more comprehensive update for two of the
major foci of TPOS 2020, biogeochemical and ecosystem Backbone observations and the
eastern Pacific. The western Pacific was revisited in the TPOS OceanObs'19 community white
paper and this report includes an analysis of requirements arising from the complex scale
interactions from weather to climate over the western Pacific Ocean. Additional consideration
of air-sea fluxes and the planetary boundary layers in the tropical Pacific are also included in
this report.
TPOS 2020 sponsors specifically requested further consideration of requirements arising from
monsoon and subseasonal timescales; severe storms and any special ocean observing
requirements; observations related to Indo‐Pacific exchanges; and any requirements emerging
from the new class of coupled numerical weather prediction models. This report, supported by
the Community White Paper on the TPOS published for OceanObs'19 (Smith et al., 2019;
hereafter TPOS OceanObs'19), represents a substantial, but not yet complete, response to this
charge.
