Abstract. A major accomplishment of the recently completed Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) Program was the development of an ocean observing system to support seasonal-to-interannual climate studies. This paper reviews the scientific motivations for the development of that observing system, the technological advances that made it possible, and the scientific advances that resulted from the availability of a significantly expanded observational database. A primary phenomenological focus of TOGA was interannual variability of the coupled oceanatmosphere system associated with E1 Nifio and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Prior to the start of TOGA, our understanding of the physical processes responsible for the ENSO cycle was limited, our ability to monitor variability in the troi•ical oceans was primitive, and the capability to predict ENSO was nonexistent. TOGA therefore initiated and/or supported efforts to provide real-time measurements of the following key oceanographic variables: surface winds, sea surface temperature, subsurface temperature, sea level and ocean velocity. Specific in situ observational programs developed to provide these data sets included the Tropical AtmosphereOcean (TAO) array of moored buoys in the Pacific, a surface drifting buoy program, an island and coastal tide gauge network, and a volunteer observing ship network of expendable bathythermograph measurements. Complementing these in situ efforts were satellite missions which provided near-global coverage of surface winds, sea surface temperature, and sea level. These new TOGA data sets led to fundamental progress in our understanding of the physical processes responsible for ENSO and to the development of coupled ocean-atmosphere models for ENSO prediction.And thorough this distemperature we see the seasons alter

Combining airborne remote, in situ, and expendable probe sensors with air-deployed ocean platforms provides a strategy for expanding knowledge of illusive high-wind air-sea fluxes in difficult-to-predict storms.

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[1] A new criterion, based on the shallowest extreme curvature of near surface layer density or temperature profiles, is established for demarking the mixed layer depth, h mix . Using historical global hydrographic profile data, including conductivitytemperature-depth and expendable bathythermograph data obtained during World Ocean Circulation Experiment, its seasonal variability and monthly to interannual anomalies are computed. Unlike the more commonly used D criterion, the new criterion is able to deal with both different vertical resolutions of the data set and a large variety of observed stratification profiles. For about two thirds of the profiles our algorithm produces an h mix/c that is more reliable than the one of the D criterion. The uncertainty for h mix/c is ±5 m for high-(<5 m) and ±8 m for low-(<20 m) resolution profiles. A quality index, QI mix , which compares the variance of a profile above h mix to the variance to a depth of 1.5 Â h mix , shows that for the 70% of the profile data for which a clearly recognizable well-mixed zone exists near the surface, our criterion identifies the depth of the wellmixed zone in all cases.

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