Pilot Study in 2015 for the Years of the Maritime Continent (YMC) in 2017-2019

Currently, researchers from all over the world are planning to conduct a two-year field experiment called “Years of the Maritime Continent (YMC)” starting from July 2017. It aims at expediting the progress of improving understanding and prediction of the weather-climate systems over the MC and its global impact through observations and modeling studies. While it is easy to say having a campaign, indeed it will be a hard mission to achieve this in terms of not only the nature condition but also logistics. For example, if we want to monitor propagating convections from land to ocean, which originally developed over the coast owing to solar diurnal cycle, we should know where the best position for a ship deployment is. This is indeed a challenge. Thus, a research group which consists of several institutes and universities from Japan and Indonesia has made a field campaign off and on the west coast of Sumatra Island in November to December 2015 as a pilot study for YMC. In this talk, we will briefly mention about our strategy and overview of this campaign as well as preliminary results related to convective activity.