PACLIM STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
In 1984, a workshop was held on "Climatic Variability of the Eastern North Pacific
and Western North America". From it has emerged an annual series of workshops held
at the Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey Peninsula, California. These annual
meetings, which involve 80-100 participants, have come to be known as PACLIM (Pacific Climate)
Workshops, reflecting broad interests in the climatologies associated with the Pacific
Ocean and western Americas in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Participants have included atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, glaciologists, oceanographers,
limnologists, and both marine and terrestrial biologists. A major goal of PACLIM
is to provide a forum for exploring the insights and perspectives of each of these
many disciplines, and for understanding the critical linkages between them.
PACLIM arose from a growing concern about climate variability and its societal and
ecological impacts. Storm frequency, snow pack, droughts and floods, agricultural
production, water supply, glacial advances, stream chemistry, sea surface temperature,
salmon catch, lake ecosystems, and wildlife habitat are among the many aspects of climate
and climatic impacts addressed by PACLIM Workshops. Workshops also address broad
concerns about the impact of possible climate change over the next century. From
observed changes in the historical record, the conclusion is evident that climate change
would have large societal impacts through effects on global ecology, hydrology, geology,
and oceanography.
Our ability to predict climate, climate variability, and climate change critically
depends upon an understanding of global processes. Human impacts are primarily terrestrial
in nature, but the major forcing processes are atmospheric and oceanic in origin
and transferred through geologic and biologic systems. Our understanding of the global
climate system and its relationship to ecosystems in the Eastern Pacific area arises
from regional study of its components in the Pacific Ocean and the western Americas, where ocean/atmosphere coupling is strongly expressed. Empirical evidence suggests
that large-scale climatic fluctuations force large-scale ecosystem response in the
California Current and in a very different system, the North Pacific central gyre.
With such diverse meteorologic phenomena as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and shifts
in the Aleutian Low and North Pacific High, the Eastern Pacific has tremendous global
influences, and particularly strong effects on North America. In the western United
States where rainfall is primarily a cool-season phenomenon, year-to-year changes
in the activity and tracking of North Pacific winter storms have substantial influence
on the hydrological balance. The region is rich in climatic records, both instrumental and proxy. Recent research efforts are beginning to focus on better paleoclimatic
reconstructions that will put present day climatic variability in context and allow
better anticipation of future variations and changes.
The PACLIM Workshops address the problem of defining regional coupling of multifold
elements, as organized by global phenomena. Because climate expresses itself throughout
the natural system, our activity has been, from the beginning, multidisciplinary
in scope. The specialized knowledge from different disciplines has brought together
climatic records and process measurements to synthesize an understanding of the complete
system. Our interdisciplinary group uses diverse time series, measured both directly and through proxy indicators, to study past climatic conditions and current processes
in this region. Characterizing and linking the geosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere
in this region provides a scientific analogue and, hence, a basis for understanding similar linkages in other regions, as well as for anticipating the response to future
climate variations. Our emphasis in PACLIM is to study the interrelationships among
diverse data. To understand these interactive phenomena, we incorporate studies
that consider a broad range of topics both physical and biological, time scales from
months to millennia, and space scales from single sites to the entire globe.
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