The 41^st Session of the WCRP's Joint Scientific Committee (JSC) was opened online on Monday 18, 2020 and closed on 22 May.

In this special situation of the pandemic of COVID-19, the initial face-to-face JSC-41 was changed into a condensed and virtual meeting. More than 80 scientists/WCRP staffs including JSC members, chairs of core projects, grand challenges (GC) and working groups (WG), members of the WCRP Joint Planning Staff, representatives from sponsor agencies, partners and guests, gathered in this big online conference.

At the beginning of the meeting, the JSC Chairs and representatives from WCRP co-sponsors expressed their welcomes. Then particular attention was accorded to WCRP’s strategy implementation and transition: the update on implementation process were reported by Detlef and Helen, following by the discussions on WCRP structure and elements; on the second day main recommendations from Task Teams were summarized and further steps required to reach WCRP goals was discussed. The WCRP activities from the core projects, GC, and WG during the past year and plans for the future were reviewed by the JSC members and the co-sponsors.

Besides the regular WCRP business, comments from partners and some other WCRP issues were discussed during the meeting. One interesting but meaningful report is about the WCRP carbon footprint. Pierre calculated the WCRP carbon footprint of last year, and pointed out that most of the carbon footprint is from the business travel, it will be much remarkable to reduce the carbon footprint if presential meetings are replaced by a mix of online/physical activities.

Despite the online format, this meeting was very fruitful. Jose Santos, Executive Director of the International CLIVAR Project Office (ICPO), and Jing Li and Liping Yin, staff scientists of ICPO, along with Rupa Kumar Kolli, Director of the ICMPO, attended this videoconference.