Workshop: Observational campaigns for better weather forecasts

The Iceland Greenland Seas Project (IGP) is a coordinated atmosphere-ocean research program investigating climate processes in the source region of the densest waters of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. During February and March 2018, a field campaign was executed over the Iceland and southern Greenland Seas that utilized a range of observing platforms to investigate critical processes in the region – including a research vessel, a research aircraft, moorings, sea gliders, floats and a meteorological buoy. A remarkable feature of the field campaign was the highly-coordinated deployment of the observing platforms; the research vessel and aircraft tracks were planned in concert to allow simultaneous sampling of the atmosphere, the ocean and their interactions. Here we use some of these observations to evaluate the quality of a number of numerical weather prediction forecasts, analyses and reanalyses. In particular we make use of low-level aircraft observations where bulk and turbulent atmospheric variables are available. A coupled evaluation, using boundary-layer observations from both the atmosphere and ocean is underway.