Building links worldwide among oceanographic institutions to promote long-term cooperation in comprehensive global-ocean observations

POGO: a lyrical sequence of letters with little clue as to what they acronimate. What is POGO? Although they were great fun when we were kids, BIOS is not dedicating an entire edition of Meridian to the bouncing sticks for sugar-saturated children to injure themselves on, nor is it the famous Japanese wrestler.

To marine scientists, and for us here at BIOS - equally fond of our FLALs (Four Letter Acronym Labels) - POGO is the Partnership for the Observation of the Global Oceans.

The contributions of POGO to the education of marine science around the globe merit a more serious consideration. Two thirds of the world's oceans are in the southern hemisphere, and yet most of our well-resourced marine research centers are in the northern hemisphere. With our growing concern over the changing climate of our planet, it is becoming increasingly important that we are able to comprehensively understand the significant role that the world's oceans have in that balance.

In March 1999, the Directors of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the US and the Southampton Oceanography Centre in the UK met to discuss this problem: there is too much water to keep an eye on and too few people trained to do it. The need for a global network - connecting scientists across the globe and pooling their resources and datasets - was clear. Hence, the concept of POGO was born: a forum with the aim of implementing an international and integrated global ocean observing system.

Today, POGO has thirty-three member institutions from twenty-two different countries across the globe, from Japan to Germany, India to the USA. The forum as a whole does not mobilise research projects with scientific goals; rather, it focuses on the infrastructures behind research and education in the marine sciences, on ensuring that links between institutions are adequate, that resources and data are pooled as much as possible, and on public outreach and capacity building. By reducing barriers between research centres around the world, POGO aims encourage developing countries to participate fully in collecting using environmental information for their own needs.

In many ways, POGO can be considered to be a 'virtual institution', having no physical base or headquarters. Recognising the need for there to be some means of uniting the Nippon-funded POGO scholars, the institution's officials decided to create a 'Centre of Excellence', where the students could be trained together. BIOS was proud to be chosen as the site for this venture at the beginning of 2008.