THE PIRATA PROGRAM

The overarching goals of PIRATA are to * improve the description of the intraseasonal to interannual variability in the atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers in the tropical Atlantic; * improve our understanding of the relative contributions of air-sea fluxes and ocean dynamics to variability in sea surface temperature (SST) and subsurface heat content at intraseasonal to interannual time scales; * provide a set of data useful for developing and improving the predictive models of the ocean-atmosphere coupled system; * document interactions between tropical Atlantic climate and variability outside the region (e.g., ENSO or the North Atlantic Oscillation); and * design, deploy, and maintain an array of moored oceanic buoys and collect and transmit a set of oceanic and atmospheric data, via satellite in real time, to monitor and study the upper ocean and atmosphere of the tropical Atlantic. PIRATA places high priority on high-resolution time series measurements of surface heat and moisture fluxes, sea surface temperature and salinity, and subsurface temperature and salinity in the upper 500 m, collected by a network of Autonomous Temperature Line Acquisition System (ATLAS) moored buoys (see sidebar).