A better understanding of ocean climate and ecosystems, as well as human impacts and vulnerabilities, requires the coordination of a continuous and long - term
system of ocean observations.
A new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds that
continuity of ocean observations is vital to gain an accurate understanding of the climate, and calls for a decadal, national plan that is adequately resourced and implemented to ensure critical ocean information is available to understand and predict future changes.
Based on model experiments, it has been suggested that errors resulting from the highly inhomogeneous
distribution of ocean observations in space and time (see Appendix 5.
«NASA's
examination of ocean observations has provided its own unique contribution to our knowledge of decadal climate trends and global warming,» said Veronica Nieves, a researcher at JPL and the University of California, Los Angeles and co-author of the new study.