The PISTON and CAMP2Ex field programs: Coupled Meteorology, Oceanography and Compositional Systems Field Research on the Boreal Summertime Southwest Monsoon

Much of the climate and meteorology communities’ focus on tropical intraseasonal oscillations has involved the boreal winter Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), and most recently it’s propagation across the Maritime Continent and the so-called “prediction barrier”. However, the boreal summer monsoon and its associated MJO/Boreal Summer Intraseasonal Oscillation (BSISO) are equally important to the global climate, meteorological, oceanographic and compositional systems. In 2018, two field campaigns will be conducted in the waters and airspace of the Philippines to understand this coupled system. The ONR sponsored Propagation of IntraSeasonal Tropical OscillatioNs (PISTON) is scheduled to deploy the R/V Thompson to the west of Luzon in mid-August to mid-October to study how air-sea-land interaction and diurnal meteorology are related to MJO/BSISO propagation. The NASA Cloud, Aerosol, Monsoon Processes-Philippines Experiment (CAMP2Ex) is scheduled to deploy the NASA P3 and SPEC Lear 35 to Subic Bay from late July through late August to investigate the region’s coupled cloud, radiation, and aerosol system. With these two campaigns, regionally unprecedented field, remote sensing, and modeling assets will be brought to bear on understanding the entire southwest monsoon system of the northwest Pacific. In this talk we present the key research topics of these two missions and demonstrate how they complement one another through their linking of scales from local turbulence through clouds, organized convection, regional meteorology and ultimately climate.