Ocean's impact on climate predictions.

Forecasting the weather more than a few days in advance is no easier in Europe than it is anywhere else. A stabilizing effect of the North Atlantic, however, may enable scientists to predict climatic trends in the region for up to 10 years.

A new computer model developed by Stephen M. Griffies of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Princeton, N.J., and Kirk Bryan of Princeton University indicates that ocean conditions like salinity and temperature-major factors affecting climate-change more slowly in the North Atlantic than in other locations. The North Atlantic has tremendous inertia, the researchers conclude in the Jan. 10 Science.

To take advantage of the new model's ability to improve climatic prediction, more measurements of temperatures, depth, and salinity throughout the North Atlantic are needed, Bryan says. Such data could be obtained from a system of climate-sensing buoys similar to one that NOAA installed recently in the western Pacific.

The computer model may be valuable because it accounts simultaneously for several factors influencing climate, says Peter Rhines, a University of Washington oceanographer. But its accuracy in portraying some of the factors, such as deep ocean convection, flows down steep seafloor boundaries, turbulent mixing, ice dynamics, and freshwater exchange with land and atmosphere, may require further refinement, he says.