Editor's Note

Welcome to the first issue of "Subtle Signals"!!!

The purpose of this quarterly newsletter is to communicate news and views in a timely manner within the decadal climate variability and applications communities. Abstracts or shorter versions of recently published or to be published papers, and articles not intended to be published or can not be published about any aspect of decadal climate variability and its societal impacts will be published in "Subtle Signals". Opinion pieces, programmatic news, meeting summaries, and call-for-papers pertaining to decadal climate variability and its societal impacts will also be published in "Subtle Signals". Documents posted on DecVar.org in the previous quarter will be listed and linked.

The name "Subtle Signals" was chosen for this newsletter because decadal climate signals are subtle yet make a noticeable impact on society. Also, they appear to interact with interannual climate variability subtly and have the potential to subtly interfere in the detection and quantification of anthropogenic climate change.

"Subtle Signals" will be published in February, May, August, and November. Contributions should not be more than 2-3 pages of text (MS Word preferred) and 2-3 figures (JPEG or GIF preferred), and will be published without any change.

In this Issue:

Climate Variability and Change
 J. Fein
National Science Foundation
Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A
 R. Dole
NOAA/Climate Diagnostic Center
Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.

Global Change Open Science Conference: Challenges of a Changing Earth
 Antonio J. Busalacchi
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland, U.S.A

An Alternative Hypothesis for the Origin of the Decadal ENSO-like Variation in the Pacific
 Toshio Yamagata and Jing-Jia Luo
Institute for Global Change Research
Yokohama, Japan.

A Shift in Atlantic Ocean Warm Events: A preliminary Study
 Cássio N. Campos, Marlos Góes, Andréa S. Taschetto, Ilana Wainer
Instituto Oceanográfico
Universidade de São Paulo

Tropical Pacific/Atlantic Ocean Interactions at Multi-Decadal Time Scales
 M. Latif
Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie
Hamburg, Germany

A New Index of El Niño Related to Decadal Variability
 Kevin E. Trenberth and David P. Stepaniak
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, CO 80307 USA