On February 10, the CLIVAR Atlantic Region Panel (ARP) held its 16th Session in Portland, Oregon, US, right before the 2018 Ocean Science Meeting. Sixteen participants including ARP members and invited speakers from US CLIVAR AMOC Team, EUREC4A project, CLIVAR Eastern Boundary Upwelling System Research Focus (CLIVAR EBUS) and the European Commission have participated the meeting.

Twelve talks under four main themes were presented. The session on Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction in the Atlantic Ocean included talks about on-going atmospheric fieldwork in the southeast Atlantic (Paquita Zuidema), plans for the Atlantic Tradewind Ocean Atmosphere Mesoscale Campaign (ATOMIC) and EUREC4A project (Chris Fairall), a precursor signal in Southeast Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SST) for extreme rainfall in northeast Brazil (Moacyr Araujo), Tropical Atlantic as a source of seasonal predictability for extratropical atmosphere (Jeff Knight), and the influence of the western boundary current on the atmosphere as demonstrated in model results (Noel Keenlyside). Updates on PIRARA-22, the upcoming International AMOC meeting, LabSea2020 project and European Union's Galway and Belem Accords and Blue Growth EC H2020 call (Sieglinde Gruber) were provided by representatives from ARP related programmes. ARP panel members showed their interest in exploring EBUS as a joint interest of the Atlantic and Pacific Region Panels after being briefed about CLIVAR EBUS work. Fourteen action items, in total, were identified by the end of the discussion. It was decided that the ARP17 will be held in Vienna, during the week from 7 to 12 April 2019, in parallel with the 2019 European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting.

For more information about the CLIVAR Atlantic Region Panel, please visit:  http://www.clivar.org/clivar-panels/atlantic