TOGA COARE: The coupled ocean-atmosphere response experiment
- Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
- Univ. of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI (United States)
Despite significant progress in the Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program, a number of major hurdles remain before the primary objective, prediction of the variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system on time scales of months to years, can be achieved. Foremost among these hurdles is understanding the physics that maintains and perturbs the western Pacific warm pool, the region of the warmest sea surface temperature in the open oceans, which coexists with the largest annual precipitation and latent heat release in the atmosphere. Even though it is believed that the warm pool is a [open quotes]center of action[close quotes] for the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena in the ocean and the atmosphere, successful simulation of the warm pool has remained an elusive goal. To gain a clear understanding of global climate change, the ENSO phenomenon, and the intraseasonal variability of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system, it is clear that a better specification of the coupling of the ocean and the atmosphere is required. An observation and modeling program, the TOGA Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE), has been designed to work toward this goal. The scientific goals of COARE are to describe and understand: (1) the principal processes responsible for the coupling of the ocean and the atmosphere in the western Pacific warm-pool system; (2) the principal atmospheric processes that organize convection in the warm-pool region; (3) the oceanic response to combined buoyancy and wind-stress forcing in the western Pacific warm-pool region; and (4) the multiple-scale interactions that extend the oceanic and atmospheric influence of the western Pacific warm-pool system to other regions and vice versa. 100 refs., 30 figs., 4 tabs.
- OSTI ID:
- 6978575
- Journal Information:
- Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; (United States), Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; (United States) Vol. 73:9; ISSN 0003-0007; ISSN BAMIAT
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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