North Atlantic Waveguide and Downstream Impact Experiment - NAWDEX
Mission Time Period: September - October 2016, Mission completed
Principle Investigators
Partner Institutions
- Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), Hamburg
- German Aerospace Center, Institute of Atmospheric Physics (DLR-IPA), Oberpfaffenhofen
- Universität Hamburg, Meteorological Institute (MI)
- University of Cologne, Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology
- Leipzig University, Leipzig Institute for Meteorology (LIM)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Meteorological Institute Munich (MIM)
NAWDEX is part of a broad, international field experiment under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) program High Impact Weather (HIW). An international consortium from the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany prepared a multi-aircraft campaign over the North Atlantic, supported by enhanced surface observations, over the North Atlantic and European region. The overarching scientific aim of NAWDEX is to increase the physical understanding and to quantify the effects of diabatic processes on disturbances to the jet stream near North America, their influence on downstream propagation across the North Atlantic, and consequences for high-impact weather in Europe. The field campaign provides a unique observational dataset, sampling the key dynamics and processes associated with the triggering, propagation and downstream impact of disturbances along the North Atlantic waveguide.
The German contribution NAWDEX aims at locating and quantifying errors in the numerical representation of midlatitude Rossby waves that are related to diabatic processes. Therefore remote sensing measurements with HALO will be carried out to obtain a comprehensive picture of the thermodynamic structure near jet streams and to quantify the impact of diabatic processes for the weather evolution over Europe. NAWDEX will study the physical processes responsible for modification, propagation and downstream impact of Rossby waves on a transatlantic scale over many days in a quasi-Lagrangian experiment. The combined airborne measurements will take place in September and October 2016. This research campaign will generate new knowledge in the field of mid-latitude dynamic meteorology.
To maximize the scientific impact of the data set, NAWDEX is closely linked to a number of institutions both on a national and an international level.
The new and unique observational NAWDEX data set will be an outstanding possibility to commonly apply the theoretical methods and diagnostics close to the reality being observed by a multitude of state-of-the art remote sensing instruments. Several projects plan to collaborate and use the observational data to perform case studies and model sensitivity tests. On an international level the partners are located in the US (NPS Monterrey, NCAR, and others), in the UK (University Reading, University Manchester), in France (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique/IPSL) in Canada (Meteorological Service of Canada) and Switzerland (ETH Zürich).
Further Information
