Year of Tropical Convection (YOTC) – Addressing the Challenge of Multi-Scale, Organized Convection

The realistic representation of tropical convection in our global atmospheric models is a long-standing grand challenge for numerical weather prediction and climate projection. To address this challenge, 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/dynamic interactions, including the two-way interaction between tropical and extra-tropical weather/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, THORPEX/TIGGE, 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. This presentation will describe the science and implementation plans and status of this activity in order to update the community and entrain collaboration.