The “warm pool”, which expands from the tropical eastern Indian Ocean to the western Pacific including the Maritime Continent (MC) with the highest sea surface temperature, hosts active atmospheric convections, and it is recognized as a heat engine of the entire globe owing to its huge amount of heat release. Thus, weather and climate systems over this region have great impacts onto the global climate. Coupling processes between ocean, atmosphere, and land are keys to understand those systems. DCOP studies various coupled phenomena such as coastal rainfall, boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation, the Madden-Julian oscillation, monsoon, upper troposphere-lower stratosphere interaction, tropical-extratropical interaction, and so on mainly based on in situ observation. To advance this activity, we tightly collaborate with the MC countries through international projects such as the Years of the Maritime Continent (YMC).

Kunio Yoneyama
Director
Dynamic Coupling of Ocean-Atmosphere-Land Research Program (DCOP)