The Role of ECMWF Deep and Shallow Convection Schemes and ECMWF Initial Conditions on Equatorial Waves in the NOAA/NCEP Forecasting Systems.

Variability in the tropics is predominately controlled by convectively coupled equatorial waves within which dynamics, convection, radiation and boundary layer turbulence interact in complicated ways. Capturing those interactions is a difficult problem for numerical models generally, and in particular it puts the convective parameterization to test to accurately respond to and influence other features of the model. In a recent comparison of equatorial waves and skill between the NCEP and ECMWF forecasting systems it was found that in general the ECMWF model was better at forecasting convectively coupled equatorial waves, in particularly for longer lead times. In this study, we investigate the role of using the ECMWF deep and shallow convection schemes within NOAA's Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). We also investigate the impact of the ECMWF convection schemes in combination with the use of the initial conditions from the ECMWF forecasting system on the equatorial wave dynamics simulated by the NGGPS.