A voyage of the RV Investigator to the Maritime Continent in Oct-Dec 2019 — Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
  1. Schedule
  2. 31(i). Maritime Continent earth system science and the Years of Maritime Continent
  3. A voyage of the RV Investigator to the Maritime Continent in Oct-Dec 2019

A voyage of the RV Investigator to the Maritime Continent in Oct-Dec 2019 (#62)

Matthew C Wheeler 1 , Alain Protat 1 , Todd Lane 2 , Susan Wijffels 3 , Robyn Schofield 2 , Robin Robertson 4 , Christian Jakob 5 , Fadli Syamsudin 6 , Urip Haryoko 7 , Adrian Matthews 8 , Toshiyuki Hibiya 9 , Po-Hsiung Lin 10 , Jason Monty 2 , Alex Johnson 2 , Damien Callahan 11 , Eric Schulz 1 , Charmaine Franklin 1 , Zoran Ristovski 12
  1. Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia
  2. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
  3. CSIRO, Hobart, Australia
  4. Xiamen University, Sepang, Malaysia
  5. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
  6. BPPT, Jakarta, Indonesia
  7. BMKG, Jakarta, Indonesia
  8. University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
  9. University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
  10. National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
  11. Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
  12. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

The Years of Maritime Continent (YMC) project aims to tackle the remaining problems facing our understanding and simulation of the weather, climate and oceans of the Maritime Continent (MC). For example, many global climate models show relatively large precipitation biases over the MC and poorly simulate its strong diurnal cycle of precipitation. These errors affect the model's ability to predict the weather and climate for days, seasons, and years ahead, both locally and globally. During 2017-2020 the international YMC project is concentrating efforts of multiple countries to expedite the progress of improving understanding and prediction of local multi-scale atmosphere and ocean variability and its global impact through observations, modelling, and outreach. The main Australian contribution to YMC will be a research cruise of the Marine National Facility's RV Investigator, in collaboration with Indonesia, and include:

(1) Radar observations of atmospheric convection offshore from Bengkulu, Sumatra, or similar, for a period of >30 days to sample a cycle of the Madden-Julian Oscillation and its varying influence on the diurnal cycle of convection.

(2) Detailed measurements of the ocean and atmospheric states and the associated air-sea interactions occurring around the ship.

(3) Provision of a platform for supplementary projects focussing on (a) biogenic emissions from the ocean and their delivery to the stratosphere; (b) vertical mixing processes in the ocean to support improved parameterization in ocean models; and (c) observations of the Indonesian Throughflow to further quantify its strength and variability.

The unique observations from this voyage will lead to improved understanding and model parameterizations, helping to reduce ongoing model biases that have a detrimental effect on our ability to predict the weather and climate locally over the MC, over Australia, and globally.

#AMOS2019