NAURU

Nauru Island Effect Study (NIES)

1 November 2001 - 31 May 2003

Lead Scientist: Chuck Long

Observatory: TWP

In FY2001, the ARM Program will be installed a suite of instrumentation on the windward side of Nauru to study the effect that the land mass of Nauru has on measurements at the Denig site. This study was conducted as an Intensive Operation Period and consisted of a stand-alone instrumentation suite. The data were manually collected by ARM Nauru observers on a routine basis and mailed back to the TWP Site Scientist for analysis. The planned deployment period was 12 months. ARM scientists then compared these data with measurements taken at the fully instrumented ARM site at Denig.

More on Nauru

The second ARM site in the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) region was on Nauru Island, which is located in the western South Pacific approximately 1,200 miles northeast of Papua, New Guinea. ARM chose this site because of its location on the eastern edge of the warm pool under La Niña conditions. The physical ARM site was located in the Denigomodu District on the northwest shore of the island near the General Hospital.

• Operational Status
  Installation began in late September 1998, and operations began mid-November 1998. The site was formally commissioned on November 28, 1998. The Nauru facility operations and data collections officially ended on August 30, 2013.
• Instrumentation
  This second Atmospheric Radiation and Cloud Station-2 (ARCS-2) had a number of state-of-the-art instruments gathering meteorological data around the clock. The data were then shipped back on tape to the ARM Experiment Center for processing and archiving in the ARM Archive.
• Intensive Operational Periods
  From June 16 through July 15, 1999, an international research collaboration called Nauru99 was conducted on and around the island of Nauru. The NOAA R/V Ronald H. Brown and the JAMSTEC R/VMirai measured surface and radiation fluxes at sea, for comparison with the land-based ARCS systems and the TAO buoy array.