We welcome abstracts on methods for evaluating weather forecasts in the Tropics. The quality of numerical weather prediction (NWP) in the Tropics is important not only because of the local impact of tropical convection, but also because improved forecasts of convective activity in the Tropics can positively impact forecast skill in Mid-latitudes several days later. Differences in the dynamics between Mid-latitudes and Tropics suggest that different metrics may be necessary to evaluate numerical weather forecasts in those regions. Standard metrics such as QPF and anomaly correlations may need to be augmented with process-based metrics and diagnostics taking into account known model biases/ difficulties in the Tropics in addition to current knowledge of tropical dynamics. Contributions proposing new methods for evaluating NWP forecasts in the Tropics, for example how to assess the models' forecast skill of phenomena with time scales longer than a few days, or diagnostics based on energy budgets, are particularly encouraged.
Expected topics include diagnostics of tropical convection and dynamical contributions to tropical convection, metrics describing tropical - extratropical interactions, and comparison of NWP model performance in the Tropics.
14A.3
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