Overview of the YMC-Sumatra 2017

Years of the Maritime Continent or YMC is a two-year field campaign project, which aims at improving understanding and prediction of local multi-scale variability of the weather and climate systems through observations and numerical modeling studies. During the two-year period starting from July 2017, several intensive observation periods (IOPs) are set to study specific research topics under the coordination with the MC countries. As one of IOPs, YMC-Sumatra 2017 will be conducted around the west coast of Sumatra Island from November 16, 2017 through January 15, 2018. Its major theme is to study diurnal cycle of rain, the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), and their interaction. Since previous studies showed that convective rain develops diurnally along the coast in the afternoon, and then propagates offshoreward in the nighttime, we deploy our observation platforms both at land Bengkulu (4S, 102E), and at sea using the R/V MIRAI to capture propagation of convective systems. We will conduct atmospheric and oceanic observations using weather radars, radiosonde, surface meteorological station, CTD, ADCP, turbulent profiler, wave-glider, mooring, and so on. In addition, cloud-system resolving general circulation model NICAM offers forecast during the IOP. In this talk, a brief summary of this campaign with referring several preliminary results as well as large-scale atmospheric and oceanographic features will be presented.