Beginning in September 2020 and ending in 2022, the EUREC4A-OA project was part of the larger EUREC4A study campaign dedicated to understanding the relationships between clouds, oceans and climate. EUREC4A-OA represented its component focused specifically on ocean and atmosphere; the Italian entities involved (University of Milan Bicocca and CIMA Research Foundation) were funded by the then Ministry of University and Research.
The project
The overall aim of the project, led by the Laboratoire de météorologie dynamique (ENS-LMD), was the advancement of knowledge on the dynamics and representations of air-sea interaction and oceanic physical and biogeochemical processes. This, in turn, enables the evaluation and improvement of the new generation of coupled models, which reproduce weather and climate phenomena on a small scale (a few kilometers).
In more detail, the project aimed to assess the exchanges of water, energy and carbon dioxide between the ocean and the atmosphere, identify, quantify and understand the role of the processes that govern them at small scales and, based on this information, improve predictive modeling.
The project also used field campaigns to collect data and study the interactions between the Northwest Atlantic Ocean and the mesoscale atmosphere and their relationship with Oceanic Barrier Layers (OBLs) and low-density atmospheric convection.
Results
- Contribution to improving the representation of small-scale nonlinear ocean-atmosphere interactions in Climate Models by innovative joint observing and modelling approaches.
CIMA Research Foundation’s contribution
As part of the project, we focused on performing meteorological simulations, using the WRF model, with high spatial and temporal resolution, including sensitivity analysis on aerosols and the impact of microphysical parameterizations.