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Abstract

THIS EDITION of Exchanges focuses on the recent decadal review of the Indian Ocean Observing System (IndOOS) and its outcomes. IndOOS was established in 2006 under the visionary leadership of Dr. Gary Meyers (1941-2016), the founding chair of the CLIVAR/IOC-GOOS Indian Ocean Regional Panel (IORP), to address the need for a sustained observing system that consists of a variety of observing platforms to support weather and climate research and prediction. Key founding components of the IndOOS were a tropical basin-wide mooring array-the Research moored Array for African Asian Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction (RAMA)-and a network of repeat expendable bathythermograph (XBT) lines. Broad international participation and support, facilitated and coordinated by the regional GOOS alliance (IO-GOOS) and the IndOOS Resources Forum (IRF), have played a crucial role in maximizing the limited resources available to implement the IndOOS. IndOOS has now passed the 10-year milestone. A full decadal review report has recently been released as the outcome of a three-year review effort led by the IORP co-chairs, Lisa Beal, Jérôme Vialard, and Mathew Koll Roxy, with a writing team comprising more than 60 scientific experts. As highlighted in their article in this issue, the decadal review has generated 136 actionable recommendations and led to a roadmap of an enhanced observing system for the next decade (2020-2030). This second phase, IndOOS-2 (Figure 1, cover page), is designed to meet the current and future societal needs for seamless prediction of Indian Ocean climate and ecosystems across a wide range of timescales, from days to seasons to years to decades to centuries and beyond. Achieving goals of IndOOS-2 will depend critically on capacity building, resource management, regional partnerships, and information sharing. It is becoming more important than ever that the scientific community actively engages with stakeholders, policy makers, and civil society in the Indian Ocean rim countries to build and sustain IndOOS-2, and to address the grand challenges identified by the World Climate Research Program and the societal outcomes envisioned under the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The main body of this edition is a condensed version of the full IndOOS-2 report, reorganized under five main science themes: natural and anthropogenic warming of the Indian Ocean, monsoon and regional airsea interaction, ocean processes and modelling, physical and biogeochemical processes and interactions, and climate information and prediction across timescales. These themed articles, written by many lead authors of the full report, are meant to provide collective reviews that address the progress made and the gaps that still exist in understanding the complex dynamical and biogeochemical processes in the Indian Ocean, and in improving prediction skills for weather, climate, and ecosystems. The OceanObs'19 (16-21 September 2019, Hawaii) called for new cooperative models for Observing System Governance to better align...