The tropical Pacific Ocean is about to be probed by an intensive international field campaign—PUMACAT—designed to capture the small-scale processes that drive the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Current climate models struggle to predict El Niño and its global weather impacts beyond six months because they misrepresent how the ocean and atmosphere exchange heat and momentum in this region. The problem is that large-scale circulation and tiny, fast-moving processes—like ocean upwelling and mixing—interact in ways models cannot yet simulate accurately. This project will design an optimal observing strategy, using model output and existing data to decide exactly where, when, and how to measure these interactions during the campaign. If successful, the data will directly improve the dynamical models that underpin seasonal weather forecasts and long-term climate projections. Better predictions of El Niño and La Niña events would help governments, farmers, and disaster planners prepare for floods, droughts, and heatwaves months in advance. The work is applied: it targets a specific bottleneck in operational forecasting. The fellowship itself will also yield fundamental insight into how small-scale ocean physics couple to large-scale atmospheric circulation, advancing understanding of tropical Pacific variability from weeks to years.
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Air-sea interactions in the tropical Pacific ocean give rise to the El Nino Southern Oscillation, which impacts climate and weather worldwide. State-of-the-art dynamic climate and operational models suffer from biases in this region, and are unable to exceed the prediction skill of statistical models six months ahead of time. Improvements to the dynamical models are needed to accurately simulate and predict the tropical Pacific. Recent advances in theory and observing technologies make these improvements feasible, given adequate observational guidance. This project supports the design and implementation of an intensive field campaign that measures processes relevant to air-sea coupling in the tropical Pacific: PUMACAT - Pacific Upwelling and Mixing Act to Couple Atmosphere to Thermocline. This campaign is an international effort to improve our understanding of the tropical Pacific and its variability from subseasonal to interannual time scales, with the goal to deliver data that helps improve climate models. The approach to the design of this campaign includes modelers as well as observationalists working together to a) identify processes that need observational guidance, and b) devising a strategy to gather the necessary observations. This fellowship will play a major role in using model output and available observations to design an optimal observing strategy that maximizes the positive outcomes for both physical process understanding and model improvement. The preparation of the campaign as well as the analysis of the data will yield scientific insight of spatiotemporal relationships between large scale circulation and small scale processes that contribute to tropical Pacific variability.
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