AOGS Election of Office Bearers - 2012 to 2014

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Candidate of: Ocean Sciences (OS) Section President Toshiyuki Hibiya (CV) Professor of Physical Oceanography Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo

Mission Statement

AOGS started in 2004 as the Asian-Oceania counterpart of AGU (American Geophysical Union) and EGU (European Geosciences Union). I think, however, that AOGS should not merely try to imitate the style of AGU or EGU.  AOGS should instead aim at developing its own unique style that cannot be found in AGU and EGU. There might be several ways to do this and here is one example. As is well known, Asia and Oceania is a unique area from the geo-scientific point of view; air-sea interactions in the western equatorial Pacific  are  very strong creating  a  “heat engine” which dominates world climate; tidal flows strongly constricted by many narrow straits in the Indonesian Archipelago pass over rough ocean bottom so that excited large-amplitude internal waves break causing intense turbulent mixing; very strong western boundary currents such as Kuroshio are flowing along the coast.  If I am elected as the President of the Ocean Science section, I would like to encourage the local organizing committee at each AOGS meeting to plan some special sessions for the issues unique to the local area; this would allow intensive discussions between the local scientists and other attendees including invited world-class researchers, on the updated results of field observations and/or their numerical analyses which might end up as a future cooperative research plan. I believe that world-class findings in ocean sciences can be launched from the Asia Oceania region as a consequence of such cooperative researches and that this would eventually make AOGS a very attractive geo-science society to researchers in western countries.