Z's story plus how OTREC came to be!

I am Zeljka Fuchs-Stone, but as my name is so complicated, I suggest you think of me as as “Z” – even my kids do sometimes. Together with Dave Raymond I am leading the OTREC project. How exciting!

A bit about me and my field project background… I have been flying on research planes since my graduate years. My very first flight experience completely changed the way I looked at my work. All of a sudden instead of sitting in my office, scribbling equations on paper I got to SEE, measure, process and analyze what I am studying. I was hooked for life!

Today I am a Research Professor and the Director of the Climate and Water Consortium at New Mexico Tech where I also got my PhD and where guess who was my adviser – Dave Raymond. After my PhD I went back home to Croatia where I spent almost a decade as a Professor at the University of Split. However, every opportunity I had, I used to come back to New Mexico Tech.

Here we come to the moment in time when OTREC was thought out. It was a Sunday evening, a few years ago. I was sitting with Dave R. having beer after our usual Sunday yoga (well, usual when I was in town). And on that particular Sunday I was reminiscing about my life, complaining a bit of being bored, or to put it more nicely, complaining of a lack of challenges in my life. The kids were behaving at the time, yeah right (I have three, honestly when I had them I forgot that they will become teenagers?!? – I do have a PhD in physics, hm...). Anyway, all of a sudden Dave says, let’s do an international field project, maybe that will help with your boredom. And the next few hours were spent talking science and at the end of that evening we had a skeleton for OTREC!!!

OTREC aims to sample various stages of convection and I hope that we will collect the best data set for the Eastern Pacific and Southwest Caribbean atmosphere, one that will tell us why the storms form and why some intensify into hurricanes.

More about me at:

My TEDx talk: TEDx talk on Storms and Hurricanes
My homepage: http://kestrel.nmt.edu/~zeljka/

Hello world, from OTREC

Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) is a collaborative scientific project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, to study the weather in the tropical eastern Pacific and western Caribbean. This blog will document OTREC informally, as scientists in the field report on their experiences as well as the observations made.

The area of study was chosen because of its unique climate, strongly influenced by a very strong sea surface temperature gradient. The coldest temperatures in the tropics are found here on the equator, while very warm temperatures are found nearby to the north. These strong contrasts in sea surface temperature have influences on the convection – the tall cumulus clouds that produce heavy tropical rain – that we still don’t understand very well. The best way to improve that understanding is to go there and directly observe what is going on.

The field phase of OTREC will begin on August 5 and continue until September 30, 2019. Dozens of scientists and students from the USA, together with colleagues from several nearby Latin American countries, will be stationed in Costa Rica during this time. We will gather data from the NCAR/NSF Gulfstream V aircraft. From the plane we will, over the time of the experiment, deploy 600 dropsondes (instruments that measure temperature, humidity, wind, etc., all the way from the plane to the ocean; basically these are similar to weather balloons, but they fall down with a parachute instead of rising up with a balloon) and NCAR's downward-pointing W-band radar, which can see the rain-bearing clouds. Additional radiosondes (normal weather balloons) will be launched from the ground from locations in Costa Rica and Colombia.

  

The core group of investigators in OTREC consists of scientists from Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Colorado State University, University of Washington, Columbia University and New Mexico Tech. The international collaborators are from Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia. The project is being led by physicists Zeljka Fuchs-Stone and David J. Raymond from New Mexico Tech.

Sea surface temperature map (scale at right, degrees C) in the OTREC region of study. Boxes show the planned flight areas.

Planned flight patterns for the boxes in the preceding image.

OTREC motivation

The weather forecasts that we depend on for many aspects of modern life are made possible by computer models that simulate the behavior of the atmosphere, using the laws of physics in an approximate form. The models are imperfect, but continuously improving. One of the reasons for this improvement is the increase in the power of computers, which allows the models to approximate the laws of physics more accurately. Another is better understanding of the physics in order to allow better approximations even with the same computers. But observations are critical at every stage. We need observations to know what the weather is now, in order to give the forecasts a starting point. Also, we need observations to evaluate the models, to see what they are doing wrong. Carefully designed observations can allow us to improve our understanding of the underlying physics so that we can figure out how to make the models better.

Weather forecasts in the deep tropics are particularly challenging. Most of the tropics is covered by ocean, so that in situ observations are sparse. Also, weather in the tropics is strongly controlled by deep convective cloud systems – complexes of thunderstorms whose clouds reach high up into the atmosphere, that produce heavy rain, that steer the winds on large scales, and that sometimes organize into hurricanes. Our understanding of these deep convective systems remains quite incomplete despite decades of study, and models still struggle to represent them well. Basic questions are: why does the convection develop at particular places and times and not others? Why does it sometimes develop and sometimes not, even when conditions seem ripe? OTREC will try to answer these and other questions. In the coming weeks, we will explain in more detail what we are doing and what we find.

Zeljka Fuchs-Stone and Adam Sobel