Campaign datasets for Observations and Modeling of the Green Ocean Amazon (GOAMAZON)

The hydrologic cycle of the Amazon Basin is one of the primary heat engines of the Southern Hemisphere. Any accurate climate model must succeed in a good description of the Basin, both in its natural state and in states perturbed by regional and global human activities. At the present time, however, tropical deep convection in a natural state is poorly understood and modeled, with insufficient observational data sets for model constraint. Furthermore, future climate scenarios resulting from human activities globally show the possible drying and the eventual possible conversion of rain forest to savanna in response to global climate change. Based on our current state of knowledge, the governing conditions of this catastrophic change are not defined. Human activities locally, including the economic development activities that are growing the population and the industry within the Basin, also have the potential to shift regional climate, most immediately by an increment in aerosol number and mass concentrations, and the shift is across the range of values to which cloud properties are most sensitive. The ARM Climate Research Facility in the Amazon Basin seeks to understand aerosol and cloud life cycles, particularly the susceptibility to cloud aerosol precipitation interactions, within the Amazon Basin.

亚马逊流域的水文循环是南半球主要的热机之一。任何精确的气候模型都必须能够很好地描述该流域——无论是其自然状态，还是受区域及全球人类活动扰动后的状态。然而目前，对自然状态下的热带深对流（tropical deep convection）的理解和建模仍较为薄弱，用于模型约束的观测数据集也不够充分。此外，由全球人类活动导致的未来气候情景显示，为应对全球气候变化，该区域可能出现干旱，雨林最终或可能转变为稀树草原。基于当前的认知水平，这种灾难性变化的主导条件尚未明确。流域内的本地人类活动（包括推动人口增长和产业发展的经济开发活动）也可能改变区域气候，最直接的影响是气溶胶数量和质量浓度的增加，而这种变化恰好处于云特性最敏感的数值范围内。亚马逊流域的ARM气候研究设施旨在了解该流域内气溶胶和云的生命周期，尤其是它们对云-气溶胶-降水相互作用的敏感性。