SATELLITE-OBSERVATIONS DURING TOGA COARE - LARGE-SCALE DESCRIPTIVE OVERVIEW

The 1992/93 Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) was specifically designed to monitor multi scale interactions between the atmosphere and ocean over the western P acific warm pool. To help meet this objective, satellite observations were used to augment the enhanced COARE conventional data array in bot h space and time. In this paper the authors present a descriptive over view of convective cloud variability and sea surface temperature durin g the four-month intensive observational period (IOP) as revealed by s atellite. Time series of Geostationary Meteorological Satellite infrar ed brightness temperatures are evaluated at selected equatorial locati ons in the western Pacific and eastern Indian Oceans. Intraseasonal mo des of transient convection/cloudiness are revealed, with two eastward -propagating Madden-Julian oscillations identified. Spectral analysis on the time series data indicates that higher-frequency variations in regional convective activity are also found to occur. Several satellit e cloud signatures and patterns were detected during a strong west win d burst event in late December (1992), and these are described in deta il. Time-composited sea surface temperature (SST) fields derived from satellite radiances indicate that significant regional variations in S ST occurred during the passage of the west wind event. The satellite-d erived SST fields compiled during the IOP are validated against in sit u observations in the COARE domain, with a 0.25-degrees-C warm bias no ted in the composited satellite data.