Working Groups and Standing Committees

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 WG08

WG1 - North Atlantic Ultra High Resolution

Chair: E. Jansen. WG1 focused on the preparation of the Marion Dufresne 1999 cruise in North Atlantic, Labrador Sea, Norwegian Sea, and numerous fjords and estuaries along the track. The main target was to obtain giant cores in high accumulation rate sediments, if possible with annual varves, at about 100 stations along two general meridional transect in the Eastern and Western margins of the northern Atlantic and Nordic seas. This was the major operation for IMAGES in 99: a three months cruise, with USA, Norway, France, Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, UK, Sweden as participants.

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WG2 - WEPAMA (West Pacific Margins)

Chair : M-T. Chen. WG2 focused on the preparation of cruise and data integration for the study of heat flux variability along the northwest Pacific margin.
Objective: preparation of a giant coring cruise by the year 2000. An IMAGES WEPAMA Meeting was held on Jan 28, 1999, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan (minutes of this meeting)

The 2001 WEPAMA-Meeting was held on February 22, 23 2001 in Nankang, Taipeh (agenda of this meeting)

The WEPAMA-cruise (IMAGES VII) took place in June and July 2001

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WG3 - SEAMONS (South East Asian Monsoon)

Chair : P. Wang. WG3 focused on the variability of the East Asian Monsoon. Three workshops or symposium were programmed for 2000 - 2002 and served to select objectives for IMAGES and ODP cruises. In May 1999 a workshop was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands: 'Proxies for Seasonal and Interannual Variability of the Monsoon System' (minutes). For more information contact Gerald Ganssen.

In 2001 a meeting, entitled "Asian Monsoons and Global Linkages on Milankovitch and Sub-Milanchovitch Timescales" was organized in Beijing. A short report of this meeting is included in the

SEAMONS Annual Report 2001 (PDF)

2002 was the final year of the WG. At the WG's last meeting in Aix-en-Provence, France, late in 2002, questions of synthesis nature, e.g. relationships between winter and summer monsoons, the role of the Asian monsoon in the global climate system, etc. were discussed.

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WG4 - Western Margins of the Americas

Chairs : T. Pedersen and A. Mix. WG4 focused on the preparation of a giant coring cruise in the Pacific Ocean.
A Marion Dufresne cruise in the Northeast Pacific Ocean in Summer 2002 (MONA) was prepared and took place, with Canada, USA, Germany, Japan, France, China, Taiwan and Mexico as participating members.

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WG5 - EPILOG (Environmental Processes of the Ice Age: Land, Ocean and Glaciers)

Chairs: A. Mix, E. Bard, and R. Schneider. The aim of the EPILOG Project is to establish a new and comprehensive evaluation of the environments of the last Ice Age and to foster a revision of global reconstructions of the Ice Age earth, drawing on the progress made in the last ~ 20 years since the completion of the CLIMAP maps.

1. EPILOG Workshop: "Global Ocean and Land Surface Temperatures during the last Ice Age"
May 3rd-6th, 1999. Workshop was organised at the HANSE wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) in Delmenhorst

2. EPILOG Workshop: "Ice Sheets and Sea Level of the Last Glacial Maximum"
Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix, Edouard Bard (convenors).

EPILOG Report 2001
submitted by A. Mix, 26.07.2001

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WG6 - Terminal Millenial Synthesis of Decadal-to-Millenial-Scale Climate Records of the last 80 kyr

Chairs: M. Sarnthein and J. P. Kennett. The objectives and goals of this working group are i) to create a common canonical time series of short-term and abrupt climatic events documented in marine sediment records; ii) to tie the ultrahigh-resolution marine climate records to ice core and other varved records of climate change measured on calendar-year time scale; iii) to constrain the temporal and spatial variability of both the oceanic C14-reservoir effect and cosmogenic C14 production to develop C14 as a high-precision tracer in palaeoceanography and to improve chronological resolution in sediment records; iv) to better understand teleconnection processes in global transfer of climatic change; v) to prepare co-operative SCOR-PAGES / IMAGES workshop within one year of inception and to publish a special volume on its results as IGBP product.

A meeting was held involving more than 50 top scientists at the SCOR-IMAGES Workshop in Trins, Austria, February 16-19, 2000. A summary article was published in Eos.

Read the text of this article here.
View Figure 1 (.pdf)
View Figure 2 (.pdf)

Final report of this working group

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WG7 - Southern Ocean

Chairs: R. Dunbar and A. Mackensen. The Southern Ocean Working Group focuses on the preparation of several giant coring cruises in the Southern Ocean, starting 2005.

The first workshop was held at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven on June 21-23, 2001. Report of the 2001-meeting (PDF)

A second workshop was held in September 2002 in Barcelona, focussing on the development of a coordinated implementation plan. Report of the 2002-meeting (PDF)

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WG8 - Ice--Ocean Interaction

The Ice-Ocean interaction working group was established in order to bring together researchers from various fields interested in the dynamic interaction between ice/ice sheets and ocean circulation. The justfication for establishing the WG lies in the many unresolved questions regarding triggering and amplification of rapid climate changes during which ice sheets and ocean circulation undergo drastic changes. It was felt that the solution lies in a better interaction between paleoceanographers, petrologists working on provenance studies, sedimentologists, glacial geologists, glaciologists and modellers.

This WG chaired by John Andrews, Boulder, USA and Eystein Jansen, Bergen, Norway was established by Images in 2001.

Report 2001 and Proposal 2002 (PDF).
Report 2002 (Article: EOS,Vol 84, No 20)

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WG9 - Holocene Climate Variability

The Holocene WG investigates submillennial climate fluctuations during the Holocene, at both low and high latitudes, regional teleconnections, amplitude of variability and linkage between oceanic and climatic change.

co-chairs: Peter de Menocal (L-DEO, USA) and Francis Grousset (Univ. Bordeaux, France)

HWG Proposal 2001/2002 (PDF)
Activity report 2004 (PDF)

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WG10 - Reconstruction of Past Ocean Circulation - PACE (SCOR-WG 123)

This joint IMAGES/SCOR working group will

• Assess the existing paleoceanographic methods for reconstructing the history of ocean circulation over the past 120,000 years. Are the existing methods sufficient for a robust reconstruction of past ocean circulation? Are existing chronological tools sufficient to reconstruct distinct ocean circulation states? If not, what developments are necessary?
• Assess the available paleoceanographic data for reconstructing the history of ocean circulation over the past 120,000 years.Can robust conclusions on past ocean circulation be drawn from existing data? For what time periods and locations?
• Develop recommendations for future approaches to quantitatively assess the hypothesised changes in ocean circulation over the same time scale.
• Identify a minimum array of global locations and data types that would help to constrain uncertainties concerning changes in ocean circulation linked to major climate changes, bearing in mind the potential for collecting appropriate geological material as well as the size of the expected circulation signal relative to uncertainties in the methods. Through international co-operation within the IMAGES and ODP, existing cores would be identified and plans for new coring to meet these objectives would be discussed.

This plan will outline a coordinated international project which we will refer to as the Palocean Circulation Experiment (PACE).

Chair: Jean Lynch-Stieglitz (LDEO-Columbia University, USA)
Co-Chair: Catherine Kissel (LSCE, Gif sur Yvette, France)

Homepage of SCOR-WG 123 at the SCOR-Website

A first Workshop is announced to be held from 20-23 March, 2005 at the School of Earth and Athmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

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WG11 - Links Between Present Oceanic Processes and Paleo-Records

Another SCOR/IMAGES working group arises from the Paleo-JGOFS Task Team (PJTT) with the following objectives:

• improve the collaboration between the two core projects
• identify regions of specific interest for future research
• propagate these issues into the next phase of IGBP II ocean research programs.

The main objective of the proposed working group is to combine new insights gained from the study of modern biogeochemical processes and ecosystem dynamics, with paleoceanographic studies aiming to improve our understanding of past oceanic processes. In turn, accurate interpretation of the sedimentary record extends the temporal baseline of observation, thus allowing to better gauge the impact of anthropogenic disturbances against natural variability. To achieve this unifying vision, the working group will:

• Use the new insights gained from contemporary ocean biogeochemical studies to identify or refine our understanding of key oceanic processes and develop or improve proxies for these processes for subsequent use in paleoceanographic studies.
• Refine established proxies, provide mechanistic understanding and foster the development of new proxies within integrated multidisciplinary studies in the modern ocean.
• Use proxy evidence from the sedimentary records to test hypotheses of the oceanic response to climate change.

Co-chairs: Karin Lochte (IfM, Kiel, Germany), Marie-Alexandrine Sicre (LSCE, Gif sur Yvette, France)

Homepage of SCOR-WG 124 at the SCOR-Website

WG11-LINKS-Homepage

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WG12 - PEPD: Past Equatorial Pacific Dynamics

The first meeting of this IMAGES working Group will be held on November 10-12th, 2003 at the Institute of Earth Dynamics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Organisers (and co-chairs): Luc Beaufort (CEREGE, France) and Min-Te Chen (Keelung, Taiwan)

Report and Cruise Proposal 2004 (PDF)

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DAC: Data Advisory Committee

The Objective of the DAC is to provide advice to IMAGES scientists and to the Data Manager on quality and format for data storage and exchange.

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