The VAMOS Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study (VOCALS) is an international CLIVAR/VAMOS program designed to develop and promote scientific activities leading to improved understanding, model simulations, and predictions of the southeastern Pacific (SEP) coupled ocean-atmosphere-land system, on diurnal to interannual timescales. The major components of VOCALS are a modeling program with a model hierarchy ranging from the local to global scales, a major international field program (The VOCALS Regional Experiment, VOCALS-REx), and a suite of extended observations from regular research cruises, instrumented moorings, and satellites. The combination of intensive field measurements, long-term observations, and modeling will provide important insights that will directly benefit climate modeling. Some 200 scientists from 40 institutions in 8 nations are currently participating in VOCALS. Details of the three main components of VOCALS are given below.

The SEP climate is a tightly coupled system involving poorly understood interactions between clouds, aerosols, marine boundary layer (MBL) processes, upper ocean dynamics and thermodynamics, coastal currents and upwelling, large-scale subsidence, and regional diurnal circulations, to the west of the Andes mountain range.

Further information on VOCALS can be found on the program website http://www.eol.ucar.edu/projects/vocals.