Pan-American Climate Studies

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The Pan American Climate Studies (PACS) program is a United States federal program whose goal is to improve climate prediction, especially rainfall prediction, over the Americas. This will be accomplished by studying various aspects of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean, and observing how they affect the continents. The PACS program started in 1995 and will continue through 2010.

As part of the emperical studies in PACS, the University of South Florida (USF), College of Marine Science deployed a mooring in the cold tongue region of the eastern equatorial Pacific in Spring 1997. The mooring contained two Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs), five SeaCats, and nine WaDAR temperature sensors. It also had an IMET suite of atmospheric sensors. Prior to this deployment, initial work was done to provide a detailed description of the cold tongue evolution in the Atlantic ocean over the past decade using satellite derived SST data and Reynold's high resolution (1° x 1°) optimum interpolation SST data. A similar description of the cold tongue evolution in the Pacific ocean is also being done.

The mooring was retrieved in December 1997. The duration of the deployment coincided with the onset-to-peak stages of the 1997/98 El Nino, and the data should provide further insight into the evolution of an El Nino.

The data for this project is not yet available.