Starting in July of 2006, the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) project ran a major field campaign, gathering weather and ocean data from western Africa and nearby waters. The main purpose was to document the inter-seasonal and inter-annual variability of the African Monsoon, where hot, dry air from the Sahara and warm, moist air for the Gulf of Guinea interact. An ancillary project, NASA’s AMMA (NAMMA) also examined how fluctuations in the monsoon affected the formation of African Easterly Waves and the potential formation of hurricanes.
NAMMA supplemented the intensified land observations over the African continent with flights of NASA’s DC-8 over the adjacent waters. Eleven flights were made into seven waves, several of which formed into hurricanes. The flights also examined the Saharan Air Layer, a major factor in tropical Atlantic weather.
References:
A list of scholarly papers from AMMA
Edward J. Zipser, Cynthia H. Twohy, Si-Chee Tsay, N. Christina Hsu, Gerald M. Heymsfield, K. Lee Thornhill, Simone Tanelli, Robert Ross, T. N. Krishnamurti, Q. Ji, Gregory Jenkins, Syed Ismail, Richard Ferrare, Gao Chen, Edward V. Browell, Bruce Anderson, Robbie Hood, H. Michael Goodman, Andrew Heymsfield, Jeffrey Halverson, Jason P. Dunion, Michael Douglas, Robert Cifelli
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R. A. Hansell, S. C. Tsay, Q. Ji, N. C. Hsu, M. J. Jeong, S. H. Wang, J. S. Reid, K. N. Liou, S. C. Ou |
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Robert Cifelli, Timothy Lang, Steven A. Rutledge, Nick Guy, Edward J. Zipser, Jon Zawislak, Robert Holzworth |