MOC Galapagos Climate System
The Galapagos are the main subject of my climate research, and this map is the entry point to it. The organising fact is that the archipelago is arid at the equator, and that the aridity is produced by the ocean rather than the atmosphere — the causal chain is set out in the ocean-atmosphere coupling map, which is the one to read first for mechanism.
This map is the wider view: the concepts, the field context, and the modelling that connects them.
The climate itself
Galapagos seasonality is the place to start, because the archipelago’s two seasons are unlike a conventional wet and dry season — the cool garúa season delivers persistent low cloud and drizzle rather than rain, while the warm season brings genuine convective rainfall. Hydroclimate covers how water moves through the system, and occult precipitation the part of it that rain gauges never see.
The cloud regime is central rather than incidental. Cloud frequency observations show how persistent the deck is, ecoclimatic cloud zonation shows the ecosystems that follow from it, and stratocumulus and the marine boundary layer explain why the cloud takes that form. The inversion is what holds it in place.
Ocean drivers
Covered in depth in the coupling map, the essentials are the cold pool maintained by upwelling of the Equatorial Undercurrent and advection from the Humboldt Current, with thermocline depth as the control and SST as the expression. Oceanography gives the general background.
Variability
ENSO restructures the entire system, through the Walker circulation and ITCZ displacement. El Nino and the Galapagos covers the local expression, GReNI is a regionally specific index, and SST variability the observational record.
Fieldwork and modelling
The DARWIN project is the research programme this sits within. Cerro Crocker is the highland reference site, instrumented with automated weather stations. On the modelling side, dynamical downscaling of ERA5 with WRF produces the Galapagos refined analysis, checked against validation data, with heavy rainfall events as a specific application. The publication thread tracks what has come out of it.