The Atlantic Stratocumulus Transition Experiment (ASTEX)/Marine and Aerosol Gas Experiment (MAGE) collaborative experiment was a multinational effort to improve the capability for studying cloud-chemistry interactions and the air/sea fluxes that affect them. It was planned to test improved analytical techniques and new observational strategies, with the goal of putting more realistic chemistry and physics into climate models.
ASTEX, one of the second series of FIRE international cloud-climatology experiments, took place in June of 1992. The primary purpose of ASTEX (with which MAGE collaborated) was to study the factors influencing the formation and dissipation of marine clouds. Meteorological and chemical instrumentation were deployed on two islands (Santa Maria in the Azores, Porto Santo in Madeira), a Russian ship (located south of the islands to complete an equilateral triangle), three other U.S. and French ships, and aircraft three countries. ASTEX was designed to overlap with several other international oceanographic and atmospheric field programs which shared the eastern Atlantic in the summer of 1992. A complete description of the ASTEX program, including its goals, strategies, investigators, platforms, data-exchange protocols, and logistical considerations can be found elsewhere in this document. It would have been difficult to mount a MAGE experiment on this scale without the support, context, and organizational assistance provided by the ASTEX program.
The specific goals of the MAGE atmospheric chemistry experiment in ASTEX included