Breakout Summary Report
ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting
13 - 17 March 2017
GoAmazon2014/5 Synergies
15 March 2017
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
50
Courtney Schumacher and Yolande Serra
15 March 2017
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
50
Courtney Schumacher and Yolande Serra
Breakout Description
There were 11 presentations with time devoted to questions after each talk. The presentations focused on new findings and data sets that have matured since the completion of the GoAmazon2014/15 field campaign. Electronic versions of the presentations are being made available on the ARM/ASR website.Main Discussion
The BAMS overview paper was recently released (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00221.1) and has information on how researchers should put the GoAmazon scientific acknowledgement and licenses in their publications.PNNL has a new Scientific Focus Area (SFA) that emphasizes GoAmazon research. Future work will implement a GoAmazon Testbed to objectively and systematically evaluate model performance associated with new or improved parameterizations. The testbed will be accessible to the whole community, ideally by the end of this year.
Aircraft and ground-based measurements are essential in differentiating the characteristics of the Manaus plume spatially (such as the north and south edges of the plume), diurnally (e.g., the accumulation mode concentration maximizes in early afternoon, opposite of the Aiken mode), and seasonally (with emphasis on the clean wet season versus the more polluted dry season) and compared to local biomass burning. The aircraft measurements also provide combined cloud size distributions over the full range of particle sizes and are being used to differentiate wet and dry season in situ cloud properties.
The forcing data set for the IOPs is currently available on the ARM Archive (http://www.arm.gov/data) and the full two-year data set is available upon request. The ERA-Interim reanalysis and ECMWF analysis fields will be compared to GoAmazon observations to test fidelity of the forcing data set input fields. Several participants expressed concern for the fidelity of the wind forcing from the ERA-Interim and ECMWF analysis posted to the ARM Data Archive. More information is needed about the analyses on the archive to assess the exact ECMWF product posted. The full two-year variational analysis will likely be rerun with improved observational inputs, such as surface fluxes, GPS precipitable water vapor and recalibrated radar rain rates.
Back trajectories are available for the entire two-year campaign (http://lfa.if.usp.br), but vary depending on the parent model used to calculate the trajectories. However, Hysplit seems to perform better than ECMWF due to issues with ECMWF winds (see above comment).
GPS observations from GoAmazon (http://chuvaproject.cptec.inpe.br/portal/pedido.inicio.logic) have numerous applications for characterizing precipitable water over the region and suggest that the radiometric retrievals were sometimes contaminated by rain or dew on the radome. GPS data are now fully processed for the GoAmazon period and are available upon request from INPA (contact information provided in the GPS presentation available on the ARM/ASR website).
The AMF cloud measurements (including retrievals of vertical motion in deep convection from the RWP) had very few gaps during the two-year campaign and a merged RWP and WACRARSCL column product is now available. Analysis of the new merged product and surface radiative fluxes during GoAmazon shows that clouds weaken the seasonal cycle via SW radiative impacts and that there is an anti-correlation between the radiative impacts of shallow and deep convection between seasons. Regional model runs show significant sensitivity of propagating convective systems to the way shallow cloud radiation is represented in the model.
Two years of gridded SIPAM S-band scanning radar products have recently been recalibrated and will be put on the ARM Archive as a PI product as soon as residual clutter/AP is removed from the lowest-level tilts and other QC procedures are implemented (the goal is this summer). Image loops and other information can be found at: http://atmo.tamu.edu/goamazon-sband-radar.
A high-resolution model has been used to study 26 events of plume interactions with deep convection and next steps will be to analyze aerosol impacts on the shallow-to-deep transition using both the model and observations (with new collaborators welcome).