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The realistic representation of tropical convection in our global
atmospheric models is a long-standing grand challenge for numerical
weather forecasts and global climate predictions. Our lack of
fundamental knowledge and practical capabilities in this area leaves
us disadvantaged in modeling and predicting prominent phenomena of
the tropical atmosphere such as the ITCZ, ENSO, TBO, monsoons and
their active or break periods, the MJO, subtropical stratus decks,
near-surface ocean properties, easterly waves, tropical cyclones,
bulk budgets of cloud microphysical quantities, and even the diurnal
cycle. Furthermore, tropical weather and climate disturbances
strongly influence stratospheric-tropospheric exchange as well as
the extratropics, with the later mediated via poleward migration of
synoptic systems or through initiating Rossby wave trains that can
involve a range of processes and time scales.
To address the challenge of tropical convection, WCRP and
WWRP/THORPEX propose a Year of coordinated observing, modeling and
forecasting of organized tropical convection and its influences on
predictability as a contribution to the United Nations Year of
Planet Earth to complement the International Polar Year (IPY). This
effort is intended to exploit the vast amounts of existing and
emerging observations, the expanding computational resources and the
development of new, high-resolution modeling frameworks, with the
objective of advancing the characterization, diagnosis, modeling,
parameterization and prediction of multiscale convective and dynamic
interactions, including the two-way interaction between tropical and
extra-tropical weather or climate. This activity and its ultimate
success will be based on the coordination of a wide range of ongoing
and planned international programmatic activities (e.g.,
GEWEX/CEOP/GCSS, AMY, EOS, GOOS), strong collaboration among the
operational prediction, research laboratory and academic
communities, and the construction of a comprehensive data base
consisting of satellite data, in-situ data sets and global,
high-resolution forecast and simulation model outputs relevant to
tropical convection. The proposed timing, focus year approach and
integrated framework of this effort is intended to leverage the most
benefit from recent investments in Earth Science infrastructure as
well as entrain a new generation of young scientists into tackling
the outstanding problems in the field of weather and climate
prediction.
It is recommended that potential users of YOTC peruse the Related
RDA Datasets ds629.1-ds629.6 (please see below) which represent
transformed versions of the raw ECMWF YOTC archive (ds629.0) by the
Data Support Section. The transformed versions are archived on an
N400 1600 by 800 regular Gaussian grid, starting from high
resolution reduced Gaussian grids and spectral coefficients. In
addition, horizontal winds have been added and computed from
spectral vorticity and divergence.
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