• Acronym: WG 27
• Parent Committee: POC
• Term: Jun. 2011 - 2015
• Co-Chairs:
  Michael Foreman (Canada)
  Shoshiro Minobe (Japan)
  Emanuele Di Lorenzo (USA)

1. Develop conceptual frameworks and low-order models of North Pacific climate variability and change, which can be used by climate researchers to investigate the mechanisms of those variations and by ecosystem scientists to explore hypotheses linking ecosystem dynamics and physical climate.
2. Summarize the current understanding of mechanisms of Pacific climate variability and change, and evaluate the strengths of the underlying hypotheses with supporting evidence.
3. In conjunction with ecosystem scientists, coordinate the development and implementation of process-based models, which include important processes in simple forms, to hindcast the variability of available long-term biological time series.
4. Develop a method to identify and provide uncertainty estimates of decadal variability in recent historical climate and ecosystem time series.
5. Provide improved metrics to test the mechanisms of climate variability and change in IPCC models, and in coordination with other PICES working groups and FUTURE Advisory Panels, assist in evaluating those models and providing regional climate forecasts over the North Pacific.
6. Understand and fill the gaps between what physical models can currently produce and what ecosystem scientists suggest are the important physical forcing factors required for predicting species and ecosystem responses to climate variability and change.
7. Maintain linkages with, and summarize the results from National and International programs/projects such as CLIVAR, IMBER, US CAMEO, ESSAS, Japanese Hot Spot in the Climate System, POMAL, CREAMS EAST-I, POBEX, and others.
8. Convene workshops and sessions to evaluate and compare results and maintain an awareness of state-of-the-art advances outside the PICES community.
9. Publish a final report summarizing results.

Video Presentation available at http://o3d.org/web_db_movies/PICES-WG27-TORs.mov

Linkages to the FUTURE Science Plan:

1. What determines an ecosystem’s intrinsic resilience and vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic forcing?
2. How do ecosystems respond to natural and anthropogenic forcing, and how might they change in the future?
3. How do human activities affect coastal ecosystems and how are societies affected by changes in these ecosystems?