Minutes of the second annual meeting of the Zonal Monitoring Program for the Northwest Atlantic

In particular, a proposition was made for a standard presentation of data from the fixed stations and from the sections, the development of specific climatic indices was agreed upon, a specific plan for archiving the zonal monitoring data at MEDS was presented, and the proposed web site for the dissemination of these monitoring data was described. [...] Therriault proposed three objectives for the 1999 meeting : (1) to determine the content of the annual report on the state of the ocean, to determine the various regional/individual responsibilities, to decide on the form of the report, and to sort out FOC vs AZMP responsibilities in relation to the production of this report; (2) to determine what short and long term data analyses products and cli [...] In addition, the cancellation of the spring survey without consultation of the AZMP was raised and the suggestion was made that J.-C. [...] He then turned his attention to the biological-chemical database, giving first a brief history of its conception at the carbon data archive meeting in November 1997, the subsequent data modeling exercise in August 1998, the September1998 workshop to present and revise the model, and the presentation of the revised model at last year’s AZMP meeting, where it was accepted as the model for biological [...] Finally, the discussion about the biological database finished with a comment that the database is intended to be an archival one and that it is important to keep the data in the original format to remain useful to the scientists.