Activities of the R/V MIRAI Nauru99 cruise and its early results

The key factor of the international field experiment Nauru99 was to provide various data sets for the intercomparison with the Atmosphaic Radiation and Cloud Station (ARCS) on Nauru Island deployed by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and it was conducted as a collaborative research campaign of three agencies; DOE, the U.S. NOAA and the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC). The Japanese research vessel (R/V) MIRAI participated in the campaign and conducted a stationary observation from 17 June through 4 July 1999 (IOP-Intensive Observing Period). The ARCS site, the NOAA´s R/V Ronald H. Brown (RHB) and the MIRAI served as platforms with the ATLAS buoys deployed along the 165°E and the Cessna operated by Flinders University, Australia. Since convection is one of the key elements affecting the radiative balance over the warm water pool region in the tropical western Pacific Ocean, the distribution of convections developed during the IOP is studied using scanning radar reflectivity data