Abstract
Abstract. During the early months of the 2015/2016 El Niño event, scientists led by the Earth System Research Laboratory's Physical Sciences Division conducted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) field campaign. One component of ENRR involved in situ observations collected over the near-equatorial eastern–central Pacific Ocean. From 25 January to 28 March 2016, standard surface meteorology observations, including rainfall, were collected at Kiritimati Island (2.0° N, 157.4° E) in support of twice-daily radiosonde launches. From 16 February to 16 March 2016, continuous measurements of surface meteorology, sea surface temperature, and downwelling shortwave radiation were made by NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown. These were largely done in support of the four to eight radiosondes launched each day as the ship travelled from Hawaii to TAO buoy locations along longitudes 140 and 125° W and then back to port in San Diego, California. The rapid nature of these remote field deployments led to some specific challenges in addition to those common to many surface data collection efforts. This paper documents the two deployments as well as the steps taken to evaluate and process the data. The results are two multi-week surface meteorology data products and one accompanying set of surface fluxes, all collected in the core of the eastern–central Pacific's extremely warm waters. These data sets, plus metadata, are archived at the NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and are free for public access: surface meteorology from Kiritimati Island (https://doi.org/10.7289/V51Z42H4); surface meteorology and some surface fluxes from NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown (https://doi.org/10.7289/V5SF2T80; https://doi.org/10.7289/V58050VP).
Highlights
In June 2015, the weak El Niño conditions that had existed since March 2015 were strengthening and forecasters were confident that they would continue to do so through winter 2015/2016 (Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), 2015)
The United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wanted to quickly address the unfolding event, which had the potential for large domestic impacts, on the country’s Pacific coast, and developed the El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR)
Among the many assets put into play were surface meteorological instruments on Kiritimati Island and aboard NOAA Ship Ronald H
Summary
The Earth System Research Laboratory’s (ESRL) Physical Sciences Division (PSD) led the design and implementation of one component, the ENRR field campaign (Dole et al, 2018). Among the many assets put into play were surface meteorological instruments on Kiritimati (pronounced “Christmas”) Island and aboard NOAA Ship Ronald H. The primary purpose of the surface meteorological measurements was to provide initialization data for the radiosondes launched twice a day from Kiritimati and four to eight times per day from NOAA Ship Ronald H. Hartten et al.: Central-Pacific surface meteorology from the 2016 ENRR field campaign. The quick deployment and remote locations led to several data challenges which needed to be overcome both for the sake of creating research-quality radiosonde data sets and to enable the independent value of the surface data to be more fully realized. This article documents the data collection, the problems identified, and corrections applied after the field phase, and the resulting data sets
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