The 1^st telecon of the Organising Committee of the CLIVAR/GOOS workshop: ‘From global to coastal: Cultivating new solutions and partnerships for an enhanced Ocean Observing System in a decade of accelerating change’ was organised on 28^th September 2020, with the participation of Lisa Beal, Riccardo Farneti, Maria Paz Chidichimo, Weidong Yu, Benjamin Rabe, Antonietta Capotondi, Mike Patterson, Jose Santos and Jing Li. During the telecon, people focused on the discussion on the overall design of the workshop as well as the impacts from the COVID-19 to the organisation of the workshop.

As identified by the regional reviews, the needs for the ocean observing systems are the expansion into coastal where humans interact with the ocean, and the multi-disciplinary observing systems that better track oxygen minimum zones, the carbon cycle, and productivity. Thus, this proposed workshop will bring observing system scientists and leaders together with invited speakers from developing rim nations to discuss priorities and cross-cutting strategies as well as explore new partnerships for the expansion of the regional ocean observing systems.

Participants recognised that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may continuously limit the international travels in particular for people from developing countries to attend the workshop in person. In addition, different counties may have different stages of the pandemic and recovery. Also, people are aware of the pros and cons of virtual meetings, which may overcome the travel limitations but can hardly achieve the interactions and capacity building goals that can be enabled by the face-to-face meeting. Meanwhile, as people are located in different time zones, the real effective time to proceed the online meetings are actually limited.

Participants were exploring the possibility to have a hybrid modality of the workshop, or even to postpone the face-to-face meetings into 2022, while to organise a series of webinars before the face-to-face meeting in order to identify the various coastal observation needs in particular from developing countries and regions. Given the current situation of the pandemic, we should set up clear and realistic objective for the workshop. Positively, the resources and facilities from the main donors (ICTP, WCRP, US CLIVAR) of the workshop will be retained if the workshop is going to be postponed into the year of 2022.

As the CLIVAR Scientific Steering Group (SSG) and some panels are also planning to meet along the workshop, Jose will check with the co-chairs of CLIVAR SSG and the respective panels to see their opinions on rescheduling the workshop and/or the associated SSG and panel/RF meetings.

The Organising Committee will meet again in October to come up with a clearer plan on how to organise the workshop. Each Organising Committee member is expected, by consulting with the respective panels or groups, to identify at least two names who could introduce the coastal priorities and observational needs from their respective countries before the next telecon.