Last week, I attended the CINDY2011/DYNAMO Operations Planning Workshop held at the JAMSTEC Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, Yokohama, Japan, November 8-10. The workshop was attended by representatives from the USA, Japan, India, Australia, France, UK, Indonesia, Maldives, Saychelles, and Kenya, illustrating the large international cooperative effort that CINDY/DYNAMO/AMIE represents. I presented talks on the AMIE-Gan and AMIE-Manus contributions to the effort and participated in discussions related to the overall planning and coordination for the international campaign.

Any such large international campaign requires carefully planned coordination in many areas related to the project. For example, sonde launching procedures and timely input into the GTS system, archiving of campaign data, data sharing agreements, ship and aircraft scheduling and infrastructure support, personnel housing and scheduling, model forecasts and coordination in support of the campaign… These were just some of the topics of discussion during the workshop.

At this point only some general decisions can be made, given the final funding decisions are still a month or two away for several of the participating agencies. But many issues were identified that will need to be finalized well before the start of the campaign on October 1 next year, and a long list of action items and assigned responsibilities was generated.

Overall, I was very impressed by the large group of talented folks involved in the workshop and the obvious enthusiasm and dedication they all exhibited. Looks like it is going to be a really landmark campaign, one that will provide plenty of grist for the scientific mill for quite some time to come! — Chuck

Editor’s Note: Chuck Long is a scientist from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He is the ARM Tropical Western Pacific Site Scientist and principle investigator for the AMIE-Manus and AMIE-Gan field campaigns.