HOST: --lightning talk under climate-weather research theme, is Mike McPhaden. And he will talk about Global Moored Buoy Array. 

MIKE MCPHADEN: Thank you, Chidong. And on behalf of all those involved in the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array project, I want to add my welcome. And thanks to the committee and the guests who are participating in this 2020 PMEL review. 

Our project is interested in a range of phenomenon which from the short timescale severe extreme events like the tropical cyclones and hurricanes to the Madden-Julian Oscillation on seasonal timescales, seasonal or annual variability, behavioral variability, and climate change. 

And the reason we're interested in these is simple because they affect lives and property. And lives and property not just in the United States, around the world. And beyond societal impacts, they're important for understanding changes in the environment, particularly marine and terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity. 

And so to better understand and predict these phenomena, PMEL has led the development over the past 40 years of the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array. 

This is a coordinated multinational effort to design, build, and maintain moored buoy observing systems in all the tropical oceans. And in support of NOAA and OAR mission goals. 

And the three elements of that array are shown here. It's called TRITON. This was the first, it was designed in the 1980s, built in the 80s and 90s. We no longer maintain the array. We transitioned it to the Weather Service about 15 years ago. 

We still observed data and specialized data products from this array though. Two arrays that we do maintain are PIRATA in the Atlantic Ocean and RAMA in the Indian Ocean. And these are some of field operations metrics that you'll hear more about in the lab tour. 

PIRATA started in the mid 1990s with partners France, Brazil, and Germany. And RAMA in the mid 2000s with several international partners. The workhorse for these arrays is an ATLAS or ATLAS equivalent type mooring. 

This has gone through three generations. They're designed and built at PMEL. Most recent we called T-Flex. This has the great advantage that transfers all its data through Iridium. So it's very broad bandwidth. 

And to give you an example of the advantage of that kind of data throughput, in September of 2018, a hurricane went by one of our PIRATA moorings. And if it had been an ATLAS mooring, this is the kind of data you would have seen in real time. 

But because it was a T-Flex mooring, this is the kind of data we've got. A much richer information content, and more importantly, much more valuable to the National Hurricane Center forecasters. 

In the mid 1980s, PMEL had near free and open access to more buoy data. We get the data out to the community through two channels. One, in real time through the global telecommunications channel to operational centers around the world. 

And the second is through our PMEL data management systems research community center. 

Since our last review, five years ago, we serviced over 500,000 user requests, delivered 20 million files. And these are supported by 500 journal publications. 

My own research, I published 16 papers in the past five years. One example from each ocean basin-- we provided the most accurate measurements of the [INAUDIBLE] jets in the Indian Ocean to date. 

And we showed how these jets determine the evolution of the Indian Ocean dipole on [INAUDIBLE] scale. We've also shown how the failed 2014 El Niño helped jumpstart the major 2015, '16 El Niño. 

This is one of NOAA's top 10 research stories in 2016. And in the Atlantic Ocean, we did a study in the Eastern subtropical region where climate models have severe systematic errors. And we showed that the upper sea surface temperatures right there, you have to simulate low clouds accurately. 

Also, upwelling and ocean mixing. One final example. This is a paper that came out last November in Nature. It is led by my Indian colleague, Roxy Koll, who visited the project for a year beginning in August 2018. 

And this is a story about how anthropogenic warming trends and Indo-Pacific warm pool have caused the MJO to spend more time over the Western Pacific, less time over the Indian Ocean. 

And this has projected on rainfall trends around the world where the MJO has economic impacts. One final thing is that I'm the chief editor of a book coming out this year, El Niño Southern Oscillation in Changing Climate. This is being published by Wiley as part of the AGU Csentennial celebration. It has almost 100 contributors from around the world. 

And finally, PMEL has provided leadership for three international decadal reviews, one for each basin. This is a roadmap for the future. These were done to ensure that the observing systems are fit for purpose, are well integrated with other elements of the Global Ocean Observing System. And they are addressing current scientific imperatives. 

And there's a lot of commonality between these in terms of optimized creative designs, introduction of new technologies, calls for more biogeochemical measurements, and a greater emphasis on the mixed layer for air-sea interaction studies.

And so on behalf of all the partners and contributors to the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array, I want to say thank you. 

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