Generalities
The yearly Asian Oceania Geoscience Society (AOGS) meeting was hosted this year in Sapporo, Japan, from Monday 28 July to Friday 01 August 2014.
This meeting gathers a few thousands participants from various fields of Geoscience, coming from various institution in the world, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region. A number of sessions were related to physical oceanography. Therefore, this meeting was an occasion to meet, present and exchange about our respective research. As a third year PhD student, and after having published my first paper titled "Evolution of the Kuroshio Tropical Water from the Luzon Strait to the East of Taiwan", my participation to AOGS 2014 enabled me, firstly to present in an oral presentation a sumup of the aforementioned study, secondly to present in a poster the results of the next stage of my research under the supervision of Prof. Sen Jan, and receive various feedbacks before starting to write a scientific article on this subject. This was also an occasion to participate to various sessions closely or loosely related to my current research and learn about new analysis techniques and latest findings in the field of Physical Oceanography.
Scientific sessions
During the 5 days of meeting, I took part in the following sessions related to Physical Oceanography:
- Session OS11: Ocean mixing frontiers
- Session OS02: Air-sea Interactions in Western Boundary Current Systems and Marginal Seas
- Session OS03-20: Western Boundary Currents, Transport, Path Variability, Eddies and Continental Shelf Processes
- Session OS09: Ocean-atmosphere Coupling Observed from Space
- Session OS18: The East Asian Marginal Seas as a Linkage Between the Land and the Pacific Ocean I: Physical Processes
Each of these sessions lasted between half a day and one day and included several 15 minutes presentations. Poster sessions took place separately, each afternoon. Due to overlapping of some of the sessions, I selected the talks which were the most closely related to my study in each sessions and switched sessions accordingly. Aside OS03-20, the sessions I attended were not directly related to my research topic and mostly enabled me to widen my knowledge in Physical Oceanography processes. Session 03-20 was the session during which I gave the oral presentation, and was more directly related to my research work. In particular, a talk, titled "Three-dimensional Structure of Eddies in Western Boundary Currents" provided very valuable information about the water mass characteristics inside a cyclonic or anticyclonic eddie, and I intend to refer to this work in the paper I am going to write about my current research topic.
Several of the speakers during this session came from the University of New South Wale, from the laboratory of Prof. Moninya Roughan, which specialize in the variability of the East Australian Current. This topic is related to the subject studied in Prof. Jan laboratory, whose one of the focus is on the variability of the Kuroshio east of Taiwan. I could discuss with Prof. Roughan, who expressed a strong interest in exchanging experience on western boundary currents variability.
Oral and poster presentations
My presentation "Evolution of the Kuroshio Tropical Water from the Luzon Strait to the East of Taiwan" was scheduled in the afternoon of Wednesday 30 July. As this topic is a subject of an article published in Deep Sea Research Part I earlier this year, I prepared the presentation as a quick overview of the results of this paper, my intention being to raise interest in the topic, thus encouraging the audience to read the article for more detailed information. The presentation received good feedback and I hope it raised further interest in Prof. Jan's laboratory works.
The poster display for session S03-20 was scheduled on Friday 01 August, afternoon. It was a good occasion to present the results of my latest study "Flow pattern and mixing of the Kuroshio intermediate waters east of Taiwan" prior to writing a paper on this subject. I received numerous visits and could exchange with several students and professors. The different feedbacks I received comforted me in the belief that the results are complete enough for an article to be written in the subject. In particular, helpful discussions with Prof. Miyama from JAMSTEC and Prof. Hibiya from the University of Tokyo gave me additional ideas to further the discussion part of my study.
Conclusion
My participation to the 2014 AOGS meeting was an excellent occasion not only to learn about the latest developments in the Oceanography Research for the Asia Pacific region, but also to present the works I am currently doing under the supervision of Prof. Jan. It also gave me excellent opportunities to get to know several actors of the Physical Oceanography research and exchange with them. This was an invaluable experience for me and I would like to warmly thank Prof. Sen Jan, my supervisor, as well as National Taiwan University's College of Science for having given me the opportunity to take part in this conference by sponsoring my flight ticket to Sapporo.
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