Enhanced oceanic and atmospheric monitoring underway in eastern Pacific

The Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes (EPIC) is a 5-year experiment designed to improve our understanding of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ), its interaction with the cool water that upwells along the equator in the eastern Pacific, and the physics of the stratus cloud deck that forms over the cool waters off South America. EPIC fieldwork began in 1999, and involves shortterm process studies embedded within longerterm (3–4 years) enhanced monitoring built on the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) observing system. The enhanced monitoring portion of the experiment is about half-way complete and is already providing interesting new results on the workings of the eastern Pacific stratus deck/cold tongue/ITCZ complex.