■Background and Objectives
Agreement for a 10-Year Implementation Plan for a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, known as GEOSS, was reached by the participating countries and organizations of the ad-hoc GEO at the Third Observation Summit held in Brussels, in February 2005, and then, GEO was formally established. “Improving water resource management through better understanding of the water cycle” has been agreed as one of the targeted the societal benefit areas of GEOSS.
About 60 % of the World population lives in Asia, and their various social activities including agriculture are run by the bountiful Monsoon rain. In the other aspect, the vast water cycle variation in Asia can be the cause of drought and flood, and consequently, may spread an enormous human and economic damage. Our goal is to better understand the mechanism of Asian water cycle variability and to improve its predictability, and further more to interpret the information applicable to various water environments in different countries, then to help the mitigation of water-related disasters and the efficient use of water resources.
For these purposes, we need to establish an ‘Asian GEOSS Water Initiative’ in cooperation with national governments, institutes and research communities in Asia, and to kick-off discussions on observation convergence, interoperability agreement, and data management within the overall architecture of GEOSS in cooperation with GEO Members and participating organizations.
As the first step of our efforts, we have planned this Asia Water Cycle Symposium, specifically aimed at:
- To Introduce planed and on-going demonstration projects and to discuss toward observation convergence in Asia.
- To design a roadmap toward a GEOSS water data exchanging and sharing policy.
The discussion in the symposium would contribute extensively to the whole GEOSS plan, not only for the Asian regions, and especially the data policy issues would be discussed at the level of the representatives from United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO), as a part of GEO 2005 work plan.
