2019 GEOTRACES Scientific Steering Committee Meeting held in Australia

The 2019 GEOTRACES Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) meeting was held from 9th to 11th September at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, hosted by Andrew Bowie and Zanna Chase. During the meeting, the SSC members reviewed the progress in the programme implementation and defined the future programme agenda. The major topics for discussion were the review of the new on-line portal to register data to be included in future GEOTRACES Intermediate Data Products (IDP) and the timeline for the release of the forthcoming IDP2021. Both the portal and the timeline will be presented to the GEOTRACES community very soon!

The SSC meeting was preceded by a 2-day workshop on exploring GEOTRACES and other environmental data with Ocean Data View (ODV) given by Reiner Schlitzer (AWI, Bremerhaven) and attended by 40 participants. A workshop on Southern Ocean Biogeochemistry followed the SSC meeting from 12th to 13th of September. The workshop was aimed at briging together national and international scientists as well as local students and researchers in biogeochemical oceanography, modelling and paleoceanography focused on the Southern Ocean’s response to climate change. During the workshop the development of collaborative projects including GEOTRACES process studies was also discussed. The programme of the workshop is available here.

Thank you to the meeting hosts Andrew Bowie and Zanna Chase for their wonderful hospitality, to Phil Boyd for his help in organising the Southern Ocean workshop and, to Scott Meyerink for all his assitance during all these events.  We also gratefully acknowledge funding from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, the Antarctic Gateway Partnership and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre.

Pictures: (left) 2019 GEOTRACES SSC members, click here to download the picture; (center) Participants at the ODV Workshop at IMAS, University of Tasmania; (right) Reiner Schlitzer teaching at the ODV Workshop at IMAS, University of Tasmania.