Coordination and Planning for the VAMOS (Variability of American Monsoon Systems) Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study (VOCALS) Regional Experiment

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This is an award to support continued planning for VOCALS-REx. It is not a commitment by NSF to fund the field project. That funding decision will be determined by means of further review. The Variability of the American Monsoon Systems (VAMOS) Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study - Regional Experiment (VOCALS-REx) is an international field experiment designed to better understand physical and chemical processes central to the climate system of the Southeast Pacific (SEP) region. The climate of the SEP region is a tightly coupled system involving poorly understood interactions between the ocean, the atmosphere, and the land. VOCALS-REx will focus on interactions between clouds, aerosols, marine boundary layer (MBL) processes, upper ocean dynamics and thermodynamics, coastal currents and upwelling, large-scale subsidence, and regional diurnal circulations, to the west of the Andes mountain range. The field experiment is ultimately driven by a need for improved model simulations of the coupled climate system in both the SEP and over the wider tropics and subtropics. The coordination through VOCALS of observational and modeling efforts will lead to improved understanding and predictions by climate and regional forecasting agencies. Multi-disciplinary intensive observational datasets will be obtained during VOCALS-REx from several platforms including aircraft, a research vessel, and a surface land site. These datasets will be used to test a coordinated set of hypotheses that are organized into two broad themes: (1) improved understanding of aerosol-cloud-drizzle interactions in the marine boundary layer (MBL) and the physicochemical and spatiotemporal properties of aerosols; (2) improved understanding of the chemical and physical couplings between the upper ocean, the land, and the atmosphere. The intensive observational period will be a month long and will take place during October 2008, chosen because it is the month during which the coverage of stratocumulus over the SEP is at its greatest, the southeast trade winds are at their strongest, and the coupling between the upper ocean and the lower atmosphere is at its tightest. Broader impacts: The field and subsequent analysis phases will involve and foster considerable international collaboration and provide important training for a number of scientists and graduate students. The datasets generated in the field will stimulate the development of a broad range of numerical process models, and provide invaluable constraints that will accelerate the improvement of regional and global climate models.