NSSL goes 'south of the border' to improve global climate forecasting

During the past 30 months, special pilot balloon observations have been made at 27 sites in nine countries ranging from Mexico to Paraguay as part of NOAA's Pan American Climate Studies (PACS) program. PACS aims to improve our understanding of climate variability in the Americas. The network has recently been approved for an additional 3-year period to obtain wind information that will help scientists improve global climate analyses, forecasts, and modeling activities, especially in the tropical Americas. A new phase of the project will stress real-time transmission of the observations, so each country can use them for its own daily weather forecasting activities.

Beach front training on Cocos Island 300 miles southwest of Costa Rica

Mike Douglas (NSSL) and other collaborators have partnered to help set up the observing network. The original objectives of the observational program were limited to explaining rainfall variability over Central America during the wet season and evaluating the accuracy of NCEP global analyses that are widely used by the climate research community. The scope of the project has now expanded to include studies of El Ni–o rainfall variability along the coast of Peru and Ecuador and investigations of the strong low-level jet over the flat terrain of the Bolivian and Paraguayan Chaco.

New activities include setting up more balloon stations in Bolivia and Paraguay to monitor variations in the low-level jet east of the Andes mountains and installing additional stations in Mexico, to improve estimation of the moisture fluxes towards the US. The PACS-SONET project also has an active educational component, with ten visitors from six different countries having participated in one to three month stays at NSSL during the past two years. More visitors are expected in the future.

The official homepage address for the PACS-SONET project is: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/pacs.