Early results from the Nauru99 campaign on NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown

The US Department of Energy\´s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program has established long-term Atmospheric Radiation and Cloud Stations (ARCS) at Lamont, Oklahoma, Barrow, Alaska, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, and Nauru Island, Republic of Nauru. These highly instrumented sites continuously measure upwelling and downwelling radiative fluxes, as well as important surface and atmospheric parameters that affect the radiative balance. Ultimately, the ARM program intends to better understand processes in major climate regimes that govern global heat budgets, to improve climate modeling. The sites on Manus and Nauru Islands are intended to characterize atmospheric processes in the tropical Pacific\´s "heat engine"; events like Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and El Nino evolve, events that affect global weather and climate. In 1996 DOE organized a campaign to assess how representative the Manus Island measurements were, with respect to the surrounding ocean. This Combined Sensor Program (CSP) used a comprehensive suite of remote and atmospheric sensors onboard NOAA Research Vessel (RN) Discoverer to assess Manus Island representativeness, and to better understand air-sea processes El]. The NauruS9 campaign in 1999 expanded on this theme. A broader suite of shipboard sensors was supported by DOE and loaded onto NOAA\´s new Class I research flagship, R/V Ronald H. Brown