The post-doctoral fellow supported by this award will work on the general problem of assessing the impact of data collected in the upper ocean to climate model predictions. Hindcasts predictions from numerical ocean models (both research and operational models) will be compared with the upper ocean observational data sets collected in the Pacific under TOGA and WOCE. This effort will concentrate on the observed thermal structure of the upper tropical Pacific. This work will provide the needed guidance and justification for transferring the TOGA observing system in the Pacific from a research to an operational mode.
