Measuring Clouds with MAGIC

 
Published: 31 July 2015
Ocean cloud data and MAGIC were featured in the July 1 edition of EOS Earth & Space Science News.
Ocean cloud data and MAGIC were featured in the July 1 edition of EOS Earth & Space Science News.

The MAGIC field campaign, which was a unique effort to provide long-term data looking at clouds over the high seas, was featured in the July 1 edition of EOS Earth & Space Science News.

The article highlighted the data on ocean clouds collected through MAGIC, which was a deployment of the ARM Climate Research Facility. MAGIC put the second ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2) on a cargo container ship, Horizon Lines’ Spirit, traveling nearly 20 round trips between Los Angeles, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii, gathering information on the transition zone between two different cloud types.

“This was the first time ARM led a shipboard deployment, and the campaign went remarkably well,” said principal investigator and lead author of the EOS article, Ernie Lewis of Brookhaven National Laboratory. “It couldn’t have happened without Horizon Lines and the captain and crew of the Spirit and the ARM staff who lived on board.”

The MAGIC acronym stands for the Marine ARM GPCI Investigation of Clouds. GPCI is an earlier project called GCSS Pacific Cross-section Intercomparison and GCSS stands for GEWEX Cloud System Studies. GEWEX is the Global Water and Energy Exchanges Project of the World Climate Research Program. That’s a lot of acronyms, but it doesn’t seem to get in the way of the science.

Four papers have already been published using the data, and the article by Lewis and co-investigator Joao Teixeira, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in EOS will bring even more attention to the campaign. The data are available to use through the ARM Data Archive, and Lewis is excited to see what more can come from them.

“The peak of publications using MAGIC data will likely be in five to ten years,” he said. “A decade from now, scientists will still be using our work to find amazing things.”

Read the EOS article or learn more about the MAGIC campaign.

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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a national scientific user facility funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The ARM Facility is operated by nine Department of Energy national laboratories.