expanding their studies to the Kuroshio Extension farther offshore and are just beginning to run global ocean circulation models. The differences are particularly noticeable in comparing the remote sensing demands of similar groups in the United States and Japan. For example, the Meteorological Research Institute (MRI) in Tsukuba, where scientists develop numerical models for both the ocean and the atmosphere, would be similar in function to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. However, scientists at MRI have expressed no interest in assimilating remote sensing data into their numerical models, quite unlike their American counterparts. As another example, the Japanese science team for a joint U.S./ Japan project to measure near-surface marine winds by satellite has no meteorologists. This is in contrast with the U.S. team, of which about half the members are meteorologists and half oceanographers.

Interaction between American and Japanese scientists is hampered by the scarcity of Japanese publications in international journals. The research efforts and plans that were described to me were frequently only written in internal reports in Japanese with English abstracts. This is no doubt in part because the Japanese academic system does not have a "publish or perish" ethic, that is, promotion is not heavily dependent on publications, and Japanese scientists must pay page charges for journals from their own salaries, rather than from their research budgets as in the United States.

REMOTE SENSING INSTRUMENTS FOR OCEANOGRAPHY

There are a number of active and passive systems generally mounted on satellite platforms which are currently

used in oceanography. The Japanese version of some of these instruments and some U.S.-designed instruments will be flown on Japanese satellites in the near future.

The mostly commonly used passive instruments are the visible and infrared radiometers, the color scanner, and the microwave radiometer. The most widely available data come from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) mounted on the NOAA polar-orbiting satellites; AVHRR data can be received by direct transmission to any of the many ground receiving stations throughout the world. The AVHRR infrared data are converted to sea surface temperature images and are used in Japanese oceanography, as in the United States, for qualitative descriptions of sea surface variability. No particular expertise is required for their qualitative use and several facilities exist in Japan to produce these images. However, the use of AVHRR for quantitative studies such as the statistics of sea surface temperature or air-sea interaction requires a much higher level of expertise and processing ability. The passive radiometers on the geostationary satellites are used for studies of heat flux between the ocean and the atmosphere, both in the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum. Japan has its own geostationary satellite and therefore also its own processing facilities for this instrument. The color scanner is primarily of interest to biologists because it produces an estimate of near-surface chlorophyll concentration and hence biological productivity in the ocean, but it is also important to marine chemists studying the carbon cycle. A color scanner will be flown on the Japanese Advanced Earth Observation Satellite (ADEOS). The passive microwave radiometer is the most versatile: depending on the frequency, it can measure wind speed, sea surface temperature (through

clouds), atmospheric water vapor, and characteristics of sea ice. It is frequently used in conjunction with other radars to determine the appropriate water vapor correction.

The most commonly used active radar instruments are the altimeter, the scatterometer, and the synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The altimeter is the simplest instrument and measures the travel time between the satellite and the ocean surface to give a sea surface height estimate. The sea surface height fluctuations are used to infer nearsurface currents, but the altimeter also produces an estimate of significant wave height and near-surface wind speeds. Recently the U.S. Navy flew an altimeter on the GEOdetic SATellite (GEOSAT) and data from the latter 3 years of that mission are available from NOAA. The scatterometer is a more complicated Doppler pulse radar that measures the backscattered signal from centimeter waves on the ocean surface to give near-surface wind vectors. A scatterometer will be flown on the European ERS-1 satellite, scheduled for launch in 1991, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scatterometer (NSCAT) will be flown on ADEOS in 1995. The synthetic aperture radar is the most complicated instrument, collecting signals over hundreds of meters as the satellite moves to generate a composite image after extensive computer processing. SAR images ocean surface features, but interpretation of the images is difficult; mounted on aircraft or the space shuttle, it can determine the directional spectrum of surface gravity waves.

WESTERN PACIFIC GEOPHYSICS MEETING (WPGM)

The WPGM in Kanazawa was cosponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and eight major

Japanese geophysical societies (Ref3). The meeting followed the basic format of an AGU meeting with 20-minute talks in English held in each of eight sections, primarily solid-earth geophysics. The oceanography sessions included talks on marginal seas, deep and intermediate water circulation, waves, tides and turbulence, western boundary currents, and biogeochemical flux and cycling. The speakers were primarily from Japan, but there were numerous scientists from the United States and several from Canada, Australia, Taiwan, China, and Korea. One scientist used AVHRR images as part of his research, another described the growth of wind waves with fetch based on GEOSAT wave height observations, and two scientists looked at the dynamics of the Kuroshio Extension using the GEOSAT sea surface height data. A meeting of the AGU in the United States might typically have two to three times that many talks based on satellite data.

I spoke individually with a number of Japanese scientists working with remote sensing data. Dr. Shiro Imawaki, formerly of Kyoto University and now at Kagoshima University, is analyzing GEOSAT altimeter data for the Kuroshio Extension. Imawaki visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) a few years ago and worked with Dr. Carl Wunsch there. Another professor, Dr. Hiroshi Ichikawa, has made several visits to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to collaborate with Dr. Robert Beardsley, and he plans to use AVHRR data in future studies of the Kuroshio as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). Dr. Akira Shibata from MRI was not at the meeting, but he sent me reprints of his work with GEOSAT data in the Kuroshio Extension and the Tropical Pacific. Both Shibata and Imawaki are members of the newly organized Japanese NSCAT team.

TOKAI UNIVERSITY IN SHIMIZU

In Shimizu the most active group in remote sensing is the Faculty of Marine Science and Technology, headed by Professor Yasuhiro Sugimori, although there is another oceanography group. Tokai University is private and therefore has a less rigid structure, so that there are two associate professors rather than the usual one. Associate Professor Masahisa Kubota works on a wide variety of problems including several using remote sensing data. Kubota spent a year at Florida State University working with Dr. James O'Brien and is a member of the Japanese NSCAT team. Graduate students of Sugimori and Kubota are doing their research with data from the AVHRR and the data from the AVHRR and the GEOSAT altimeter. Kubota and his students have developed a state-of-the art multichannel algorithm for flagging cloud-contaminated data in infrared images and are using the carefully screened data to study the statistics of the sea surface temperature front in the Oyashio. One of Sugimori's students is studying wave propagation in the Kuroshio Extension using GEOSAT data.

TOHOKU UNIVERSITY IN SENDAI

Tohoku University is by far the most active university in remote sensing, and scientists there are proud of their international collaboration, the large number of foreign students, and their publications in international journals. The oceanography section of the Geophysics Department is headed by Professor Yoshiaki Toba, whose specialty is surface gravity waves. A direct link between waves and remote sensing is the effect of the sea state on radar backscatter. The Associate Professor, Dr. Kimio

Hanawa, has some interest in remote sensing, but Dr. Hiroshi Kawamura is the apparent expert and is a member of both the Japanese NSCAT team and the team for the color scanner to be flown on ADEOS. To get around the promotion bottleneck, Kawamura was transferred to a recently formed Research Center for Atmospheric and Oceanic Variations and promoted to Associate Professor. Kawamura recently visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and NASA headquarters. Kawamura's thesis work was in surface gravity waves, but he has subsequently expanded his efforts, with Toba's support, to include the scatterometer and AVHRR. In his large wind-wave tank, he studies the effect of waves on backscatter and he has recently set up an AVHRR receiving antenna and processing facility with all optical disk storage and automated collection. Kawamura and his students study the effect of fetch on wave heights using the altimeter, the skin effect on sea surface temperature, and heat budgets using the geostationary satellites and longwave radiation from AVHRR. Kawamura also plans to use SAR data and altimeter data for circulation studies.

WOMEN AND FOREIGNERS

My investigation of the remote sensing situation in Japan was occasionally overshadowed by my personal reaction to the lack of foreigners and women in Japanese science. The rigid academic hierarchy not only screens innovation, it also screens foreigners and women. The "climate" for women at the Kanazawa meeting was particularly chilling as there were only a few female attendees and the one scheduled female speaker could not attend the meeting. Male scientists rarely bring their wives or children when they travel to meetings. I was told that there

are some female graduate students in oceanography, although I did not meet any, but that they are not hired into the academic track. For the most part women do not work after they marry, so that women with higher education delay marriage in order to prolong their

careers.

Some of these attitudes may change as Japan becomes increasingly exposed to foreigners. In conversations with a scientist from Taiwan I learned that recently Japan has been taking more of a leadership role in oceanography of the Western Pacific, inviting researchers from Western Pacific countries to visit Japan to learn new technologies. Recently it has become possible for Japanese universities to hire foreign scientists; however, it is unlikely that they would make much more progress in the academic system than women because of the promotion bottleneck. FUTURE COOPERATION WITH JAPANESE SCIENTISTS

Future cooperation with the Japanese would probably involve an exchange of expertise in remote sensing data processing or applications for access to the Japanese science resources. U.S. scientists increasingly have difficulty obtaining funding for field studies to both validate satellite data and to make complementary measurements. The Japanese have large historical and current data archives of nearby regions of the ocean as well as a number of research vessels, which are generally used for fisheries investigations, but could possibly be used for cooperative experiments. Their rapidly improving space launch capability has already benefitted U.S. scientists in that NSCAT has a platform after its original platform was canceled by the U.S. Navy. However, cooperation with Japan is not without pitfalls. For example, WOCE, which has received unprecedented international cooperation, was

not entirely endorsed by the Japanese Government and, therefore, Japanese scientists are without institutional travel funds to attend the numerous WOCE planning meetings.

Japanese scientists are aware that they lag behind the United States and Europe in the use of satellite data and in processing software. A research plan was begun in 1989 to address this problem, Better Understanding of Earth Environment via Satellite, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. The introduction to this plan states, "Unfortunately, however, in Japan the system for academic research to apply satellite data to basic researches (sic) on earth environment such as atmosphere, ocean and land has not been well established." This plan groups approved research proposals into five basic areas: microwave observations, global change of the biosphere, terrestrial water cycle, air-sea interaction, and data processing. Oceanographic remote sensing falls into the first and fourth groups, with the first group studying the characteristics of microwave ing the characteristics of microwave measurements and their accuracy and the latter group using satellite data primarily to estimate sea surface fluxes and biological processes. Japanese scientists are trying to acquire U.S. software for processing satellite data. One scientist I spoke with was a strong advocate for the AVHRR processing system developed by the University of Miami, RSMAS; another scientist was purchasing a Toshiba clone of a SUN workstation in order to be able to use U.S. software written for the UNIX operating system. A third scientist was modifying an algorithm written for AVHRR data by NOAA scientists.

More direct communication between Japanese and U.S. scientists would help both countries: it would prevent the Japanese scientists from "re-inventing the wheel" and perhaps direct their efforts and resources to solving measurement and application problems.

Communication between the United States and Japan is improving as more Japanese scientists connect with either the popular U.S. OMNET network or the Internet network for electronic mail. Oceanographers in remote sensing are notoriously proficient on computers, both in the United States and in Japan, and thrive on electronic communication. The NSCAT team will provide an opportunity for direct contact between Japanese oceanographers and their U.S. counterparts. The Japanese NSCAT team would like to see joint meetings, perhaps in Hawaii, but given the current funding shortage in the United States, regular meetings do not seem likely.

Increased contact between U.S. and Japanese scientists may have other unexpected effects because American culture has aspects which are attractive to the young Japanese. One Japanese scientist assured me that they now officially sanction a 5-day work week (although Japanese scientists usually work 6 days a week) due to the U.S. influence. Several young scientists at the more liberal Tohoku University go home at 5 p.m. because they have small children. The young scientists were particularly interested in U.S. academic policies for promotions and selecting department chairs, as well as the policy of providing on-campus housing to attract students. One scientist suggested that in the future he may bring his family to scientific meetings for a vacation.

The one-sidedness of U.S./Japan contacts, i.e., that nearly all the Japanese scientists I met had spent considerable time in the United States, could probably be best addressed by U.S. scientists making extended visits to Japanese institutions. This would probably be most useful with a close match between areas of research. Scientists at Tohoku University appear to be most receptive to such exchanges. An Australian scientist working with Toba was making one