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Abstract

The interaction among the tropical ocean basins has received increased attention in recent years. While El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the tropical Pacific has long been understood to have global impacts, there has been growing recognition that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins feature variability patterns and feedbacks, some of which are partially independent of ENSO, that have the potential to influence ENSO.While progress has been made in understanding and quantifying the interaction among the tropical basins, much remains to be learned. This was the motivation for forming the CLIVAR Research Focus (RF) on Tropical Basin Interaction (TBI) in March 2020. One of the first agenda items of the RF TBI was to hold a workshop to energize the community, consolidate knowledge and chart the way forward. The emerging pandemic delayed the workshop planning, and eventually the decision was made to move to an online format. While this allowed a wider pool of researchers to participate in the workshop, it also brought many logistic challenges, including how to accommodate an audience that spanned essentially all time zones. The workshop was held February 24-26 and received a lot of positive feedback (see the article by Jose Santos for details about the participants' feedback). The present Special Edition of CLIVAR Exchanges summarizes the outcomes of the workshop (Richter and Keenlyside), describes the logistic challenges and lessons learned from the workshop (Santos and Li), and highlights twelve research contributions that were presented at the workshop.In holding this workshop, we received generous financial support from NOAA and NSF, and logistical support from the US CLIVAR Project Office and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). We (Noel and I) would particularly like to thank Mike Patterson (US CLIVAR) for coordinating the planning efforts and keeping us all on track, Tammy Kepple (UCAR) and Heidi Allen (UCAR) for their tireless support in the planning and holding of the event, Paul Martinez (UCAR) and Brett Batterman (UCAR) for their excellent technical support, and Jennie Zhu (US CLIVAR) for taking care of many important details, including housekeeping information at the beginning of each day. And, of course, we would like to thank Jose Santos as well as his assistants, Jing Li, Liping Yin and Qian Zhao, for their excellent support of the RF in general and their tremendous effort to make this workshop happen. Finally, we would like to thank all the members of the workshop organizing committee (Michael McPhaden, Yuko Okumura, Chunzai Wang, Ping Chang, Malte Stuecker, and Andrea Taschetto) and all the members of the RF TBI for helping with the organization of the workshop and for chairing many of the discussion sessions.The CLIVAR RF on Tropical Basin Interaction is still in its early days. We hope the workshop made a useful contribution to invigorating research on tropical basin interaction, and are looking forward to further contributing to this exciting research topic.