Tropical Field Campaign Trilogy of TOGA COARE – DYNAMO – CPEX: A Personal Journey and Attribution to GATE

As we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of GATE, I would like to share a personal story. My journey of tropical field campaigns started with TOGA COARE in 1992-93 over the equatorial West Pacific. I was a postdoc working with Professor Bob Houze at the University of Washington. We stationed in Solomon Islands during the Intensive Observation Period (IOP) of the TOGA COARE from October 1992 to February 1993. It was the first time that comprehensive in situ and remote sensing observations from ships, moorings, aircraft, and satellite were used to better understanding tropical air-sea interaction during three strong MJO events. I flew over 200 hours on NOAA P3 aircraft in convective systems over the tropical western Pacific. I fell in love with field observations that changed my professional career.

To better understand and predict the MJO initiation, we embarked on another major tropical field campaign DYNAMO that took me to the equatorial Indian Ocean. I led the aircraft observation team stationed in Diego Garcia. Once again, I flew on the P3 aircraft in convective systems during one of the MJO initiation event in November 2011. Technology advancement in airborne instrumentation such as GPS dropsondes, oceanic ABXTs, multi-frequency radars have made it possible for use to observe much more with a single aircraft than in GATE and TOGA COARE.

CPEX field campaigns took me to the tropical Atlantic: CPEX in 2017 over the Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean Sea-W. Atlantic; CPEX-AW over the West Atlantic (St. Croix) in 2021, CPEX-CV (Cape Verde) in 2022 over the East Atlantic, where GATE started in 1973-74. I flew on the NASA DC-8 aircraft in both convective systems and their large-scale environment with unprecedented multi-frequency lidars including scanning Doppler wind lidar, and Ka-Ku-W bands airborne precipitation radar. We flew DC-8 under the first-ever active sensing wind satellite Aeolus launched by ESA. The objectives include better understand complex interactions of wind, convection, and aerosol over the tropical Atlantic and improving global weather prediction.

Now you’d wonder what these had anything to do with GATE? To me, GATE was the first major international field campaign in the tropics intended to address a grand challenge of global weather prediction. Its outcome has fundamentally changed how we represent tropical convection in the global models. Other major field campaigns like TOGA COARE, DYNAMO, and CPEX have all advanced our capability of observing and predicting the global weather and climate. Another major milestone for me personally is that GATE opened many doors for woman scientists in both leading the field campaign planning (Dr. Joanne Simpson) and airborne missions (Dr. Peggy LeMone).

In this talk, I will share my own experiences and what I have learned from each of the field campaigns, not only great science but also life experiences. I will pay tribute to those brought me into the tropics – my mentors, and my own graduate students who joined me in this journey.