GOAmazon 2014 Workshop Report

Green Ocean Amazon 2014 (GOAmazon2014) will extend through the wet and dry seasons for 1 year, from January 1 to December 31, 2014. The Office of Biological and Environmental Research’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), and Terrestrial Ecosystem Science (TES) program will provide observational resources for deployment in the Amazon Basin downwind of the Brazilian megacity of Manaus. The Regional and Global Climate Modeling (RGCM), Earth System Modeling (ESM), Atmospheric System Research (ASR), and TES programs will support research using these and other data to evaluate and improve the representation of these coupled processes in climate models. The scientific focus of GOAmazon2014 is on atmospheric, terrestrial ecosystem, carbon cycle, and coupling questions concerning tropical systems in the Amazon. The experiment is designed to enable the study of how aerosols and surface fluxes influence cloud cycles under clean conditions, as well as how aerosol and cloud life cycles, including cloud-aerosol-precipitation interactions, are affected by pollutant outflow from a tropical megacity. These observations will provide a dataset vital to constrain tropical forest model parameterizations for organic aerosols, cloud and convection schemes, and terrestrial vegetation components. The dataset also will provide insights into how these are perturbed by pollution and how they influence climate.

The GOAmazon2014 campaign represents an opportunity to study interactions among often separated components of the Earth system: the atmosphere and biosphere. Further, it will enable us to expand our understanding of important tropical climate processes and to collect an extensive benchmark dataset. The results will be used to improve and validate climate models at a range of scales.

Suggested Citation: U.S. DOE. 2011. GOAmazon2014 Workshop Report, DOE/SC-0141. U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (ess.science.energy.gov/goamazon2014-workshop).