Sfax (Tunisie) - March 31 - April 1 1995
Co-organized by IGBP-PAGES, ENRICH (European Commission), MEDIAS-FRANCE, Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Sfax, and the Tunisian Association of Applied Geology, this workshop brought together 25 scientitsts from 18 countries from North to South and officers from PAGES, ENRICH, and MEDIAS-FRANCE. Its general aim was the organization and internal coordination of PEP III actiaim was the organization and internal coordination of PEP III activities over the next few years.
The representatives of the main climatic regions (Northern and Western temperate Europe, Central Europe, Mediterranean domain and Maghreb, Sahara and Sahel, intertropical East and West Africa, Southern Africa and Madagascar) have presented regional scientific priorities, current and expected research projects, organization of their scientific community, research capacities and gaps, and suggestions for future work.
In Northern Europe, attention will be mainly paid to the variability of the northern ice-sheet over the past 250,000 years in response to climate change, and its impact on hydrology and climate of the entire European continent. For the Mediterranean domain, activities will focus on changes in temperature and humidity from North to South, and West to East. In intertropical Africa, attention will be drawn on the variability of the latitudinal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone in both hemispheres, and of the Indian and African monsoons.
In order to favour comparisons and data integration between sites, hemispheres, oceans and continents, paleodata and models, some topics were selected for the next few years and subsequent working groups were organised, dealing with :
- Ice sheets and mountain glaciers, and periglacial mechanisms ; multi-proxy studies of the glacial/tundra, tundra/forest, forest/steppe ecotones;
- Hydrological indicators of climate change (lake and groundwater records) ; this focus requires access to the International Agency of Atomic Energy network on isotopic composition of meteoric waters. Implementation of new IAEA stations should also be proposed to the Agency;
- Speleothems : studies of laminated speleothems from North to South, as proposed in PEP III report, are promising as speleothem growth rate is dictated by climatic factors;
- Loess: loess/paleosoil series represent a powerful tool to analyze the West-East climatic gradient over Europe, and to link PEP II and PEP III.
- Terrestrial biological indicators of climate changes (pollen records mainly).
- Data management and multiproxy analyses ( transfer functions and multi-variate data assimilation, Internal Data and Information System - DIS): we need an operational DIS for PEP III activities for data information/organization/dissemination. This obviously requires close relationships with global DIS .
- Time series and time slices: this represents the end product of PEP III activities and may lead to intercomparisons between continent/ocean/ice record and between models and paleodata.
| Contacts: Dr. F. Gasse, URA 723, Batiment 504, Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France |
| Tel : (33) 1 69 41 67 56 - Fax : (33) 1 64 46 59 38 |
| Dr. K. Zouari, ENIS, Route de Soukra, BP W, Sfax, Tunisie - Tel : (216) 42 75 40 88 - Fax (216) 42 75 595 |