Sept. 6, 2022, 4:30 p.m.

Project: CPEX-CV

The Convective Processes Experiment – Cabo Verde (CPEX-CV) campaign began its first deployment, which will last from August 29 to October 2, 2022. CPEX-CV is a continuation of the Convective Processes Experiment – Aerosol & Winds (CPEX-AW) campaign, which took place from August to September 2021. The primary goal of CPEX-CV is to investigate atmospheric dynamics, marine boundary layer properties, convection, the dust-lade Saharan Air Layer, and their interactions across various spatial scales to improve understanding and predictability of process-level lifecycles in the data-sparse tropical East Atlantic region.

CPEX-CV hopes to address four main science objectives over the course of the campaign. First, to understand the interaction between large-scale environmental forces, second, observations will be made about how local kinematic and thermodynamic conditions relate to the initiation and lifecycle of convective cloud systems, third, they will investigate how these processes affect size dependent Saharan dust vertical structures, dust transport, and boundary layer exchange pathways. Finally, they aim to assess the impact of observations on atmospheric winds, thermodynamics, clous, and aerosols on the prediction of tropical Atlantic weather systems. The NASA DC-8 aircraft has been deployed with remote sensing instruments and sondes which allow for the measurement of tropospheric aerosols, wind, temperature, water vapor, and precipitation. CPEX-CV measurements hopes to advance the results form CPEX-AW, the calibration and validation of satellite measurements, and the development of airborne sensors.