Atmospheric Convection Research Using Autonomous Surface Vehicles

Under the international field program Years of the Maritime Continent (YMC), we conducted a field campaign YMC-Boreal Summer Monsoon study in 2020 (YMC-BSM 2020) in the tropical western Pacific in August - September 2020. While this campaign was aimed to capture and understand the behavior of northward propagating boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation by forming an observation array with a ship and three islands, we also deployed three autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) and one surface buoy around the research vessel Mirai for one month. The latter was designed not only to study air-sea interaction but also to extend a capability of ASVs for meso-scale atmospheric convection research in future. Thus, in this article we demonstrate that deployment of several instrumented ASVs can capture some basic atmospheric features associated with convection development by showing several comparisons with that obtained by other measurements. Deploying several ASVs in order of 100 km scale is the key, because it can capture gradients of surface atmospheric and oceanic parameters such as sea surface temperatures and can demonstrate a relation between their gradients and atmospheric convection-related features. Since ASVs can be deployed from small islands and controlled remotely to occupy any designated area, this might engage future use of ASVs to study atmospheric convection more flexibly.