Tropical ocean-atmosphere interactions orchestrate climate variability worldwide over a range of time scales important to society. ARTS is an international and multidisciplinary research effort that focuses on understanding the behavior of the tropical ocean-atmosphere and its teleconnections, with seasonal to annual resolution, over the past several centuries. The ARTS initiative promotes the synthesis of paleoclimate data with instrumental and modeling perspectives to address uncertainties in our understanding of tropical climate variability and its impacts. Paleoclimate reconstructions offer the only source of information on long-term changes in tropical variability and its teleconnections and derive an even broader utility when interfaced with numerical simulations.

The ARTS program began in 1996 with an implementation and planning workshop. At this time ARTS was formally adopted as a task of the Past Global Changes Program (PAGES), part of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). Subsequently a PAGES/CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Predictability) collaborative project developed (the PAGES/CLIVAR Intersection), and ARTS became it's main task. Since the 1996 planning workshop, many new tropical climate studies have been initiated and some exciting new results are being reported. The First ARTS Open Sciences Workshop will be held November 4-7, 2001, in Noumea, New Caledonia, to new findings relevant to climate change and tropical variability in the Pacific and Indian basins.

The most useful document for learning about the background, goals, and action plans of ARTS is the ARTS Workshop Report, published in 1999. The workshop report can be downloaded as a PDF file here. It is also available for viewing on-line here. Limited numbers of hard copy documents are available from the PAGES IPO.

The links below provide access to ARTS-related WWW links, Data Archives, Publications, Visuals (including transparencies), and information about ARTS contacts and upcoming meeting.