Tropical East Pacific Convection Behavior Analysis via Radiosonde and Dropsonde Data from the 2019 OTREC Field Campaign

Tropical convection in the Tropical East Pacific (TEP) region is highly understudied, making it difficult to create accurate weather forecasts from most global models. Limited observations of deep atmospheric convection, rain formation, and thermodynamic forcing mechanisms leave many meteorological questions unanswered. The region of interest also included the Southwestern Caribbean (SWC), as this provided with an analysis of two regions with different sea surface temperature gradients. These questions can be converged into one area of study regarding large-scale environmental factors that will be answered through the study of the interaction of convection in this region. The Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) experiment utilized the NSF/NCAR Gulfstream-V (GV) aircraft to deploy dropsondes that measured profiles of Doppler particle velocity and radar reflectivity with a W-band radar. Over the course of 22 successful flights, a gridded flight pattern allowed for over 700 dropsondes to be released (on average, 32 per flight). Concurrently, multiple sites in Costa Rica and Colombia released radiosondes via weather balloon to add to the database of precipitation measurements and cloud formation throughout various hours of the day. The radiosonde deployment in Santa Cruz, Costa Rica was the focus of this section of the overall OTREC project. Side activities included the preparation of weather briefings with daily weather forecasts and tracking of flights on the GV. A discussion of these results can help to provide a better understanding of the convection behavior in this region, for future development of global models for tropical cyclone detection.