Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Ocean Interactions
Ocean and Atmosphere connecting Scientists, Teachers & Students

Students, run the animation below, and examine the cloud patterns over the islands shown on the far left side of the image. From this, you can see why it is difficult to study marine clouds from island sites. This is one of the reasons why the R/V Seward Johnson was selected as a research platform for RICO.

Click on the image to animate it. (Note: The animation is ~750 KB.) The RICO, Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean Experiment, site (www.joss.ucar.edu/rico) offers more satellite imagery.