MAESTRO

Mesoscale organisation of tropical convection

Lead PIs: Sandrine Bony (LMD), Julien Delanoë (LATMOS), Jean-Christophe Canonici (SAFIRE)

MAESTRO is a French initiative that uses the French research aircraft SAFIRE ATR-42 and is funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

The project aims to answer this question by addressing the following goals:

• Unravel the physical processes that control the mesoscale organisation of shallow and deep convection over tropical ocean

• Understand how the organisation of convection impacts the Earth’s radiation budget through water vapour and clouds

• Assess the ability of the new emerging climate models to predict the interplay between the mesoscale organisation of convection and climate

As part of this project, an airborne field campaign will be organized to collect the observations needed to test mechanisms hypothesized to control the mesoscale organisation of shallow and deep convection and to assess the quality of the new EarthCARE satellite observations.

Details on the science, flight strategy and instrumentation are available from the official MAESTRO website.