GOAMAZON-SE

Observations and Modeling of the Green Ocean Amazon: Sounding Enhancement

1 February 2014 - 31 October 2014

Lead Scientist: Courtney Schumacher

Observatory: AMF , MAO

The goal of this campaign was to provide higher temporal sampling of the vertical structure of the atmosphere during the two 2014 intensive observing periods (IOPs) of GoAmazon. The AMF1 launched 4 sondes/day for all of 2014 and 2015 at 2 am, 8 am, 2 pm, and 8 pm LT (6, 12, 18 and 0 UTC). However, rapid changes in boundary layer and free tropospheric temperature, humidity, and wind profiles happen throughout the diurnal cycle over Manaus's complex forest canopy with resulting responses in aerosol, cloud, and precipitation characteristics. These diurnal variations are especially relevant over the Brazilian Amazon as convection evolves from shallow and non-precipitating earlier in the day to deep and heavily precipitating later in the day. Therefore, this campaign increased sampling to 5 sondes/day for the Feb/Mar and Sep/Oct 2014 IOP periods by adding a launch at 11 am (15 UTC) to capture rapid changes in convective cloud growth during that time. The extra launch also corresponds to the time of day the ARM G1 and German HALO aircraft was most often be flying, thus providing useful measurements of the large-scale environment during the flights. In addition, the extra launch significantly added to the quality of AMF1 instrument retrievals and variational analysis forcing data set during the IOPs. Planned operational periods: 2014-02-01 to 2014-03-31 and 2014-09-01 to 2014-10-31