University of Washington professor Bob Houze takes pictures of clouds at the SPol site.If you observe the typical AMIE/DYNAMO scientist during a day in the Maldives, you’ll find that they are rarely seen without a few key pieces of equipment—a laptop, a USB drive for sharing data, a notebook and pen for jotting notes, and…

Every Wednesday evening, all of the AMIE/DYNAMO/CINDY scientists on site gather in the TV room at the Equator Village hotel. It’s not movie night, but the weekly project briefing. Along with the local scientists, participants call in from various universities and labs in the United States, from the research ships, and from the other observational…

The SPolKa radar at the wharf site. The large radar dish is the S-band antenna while the much smaller dish in the lower corner is the K-band antenna. In the right foreground of the image, mounted on the stone platform, is the scanning radiometer.On Wednesday, October 19, I journeyed up the Atoll to see where…

The big question on everyone’s mind right now is whether the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) that looked like it was going to occur in the Indian Ocean this week is actually going to happen! This Wheeler-Hendon diagram shows the state of the MJO between September 13 and October 22, 2011. The MJO signal propagates eastward or…

AMIE PI Chuck Long discusses the use of the AMF2 measurements during a site tour with (from left) Head of Gan MMS Ali Waffir, Addu City Mayor Hussen Sodhig, and Maldivian Vice President Dr. Mohamed Waheed. We were delighted to host a recent visit with the Maldivian Vice President, Dr. Mohamed Waheed. The visit went…

After five different planes and roughly 35 hours of travel, I arrived on Gan on Sunday afternoon, just in time for the first all day rainstorm of the AMIE campaign. I was glad we got some rain to test out the performance of the various instruments, but sorry it made my flight into Gan a…

One of the key components of the AMIE campaign is the launch of frequent radiosondes (weather balloons) to explore the evolution of the temperature and moisture fields as the MJO develops over the Indian Ocean and propagates across the Pacific.  A key hypothesis of the campaign is that the deep convection can only organize into…

AMF2 operations officially begin tonight with the start of radiosonde launches at 23:30 UTC, 30 September 2011 (04:30 a.m. local time, 1 October).  A staff of local launchers has been hired for the arduous task of launching eight sondes per day, every day, for the next six months.  Below is a picture of the sonde…

Picture of the C-SAPR site showing the C-band radar tower. AMIE-Manus radiometer system and CT25K ceilometer are circled in red. I recently traveled to Manus to set up the instrumentation for the ancillary variability site for AMIE. As both a member of the DYNAMO Science Steering Committee and PI for the AMIE campaigns, I’ve been…

Yours truly giving my AMIE-Manus presentation, showing plots of the Manus MJO signal.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…