Tropical-Extratropical Interaction during the El Niño Rapid Response Field Campaign

The NOAA El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) field campaign gathered extensive atmospheric observations of the most recent  El Niño from  January to March 2016.  One of the primary scientific objectives was to better measure and characterize the expected region of strong tropical-extratropical interaction during El Niño in the field campaign region. To this end the NOAA Gulfstream IV aircraft performed 20 of its 22 research flights in the Tropics southward from Hawaii, with one of the canonical flight plan templates containing a long east-west transect that was located north of a region of enhanced near-equatorial convection.   Using a variety of diagnostics based on NCEP GFS analyses and forecasts, and on a parallel set of ensemble forecasts using a lower-resolution research version of the GFS that were done as part of ENRR, I will present an analysis of the time-evolving interaction of El Niño convectively driven circulation anomalies with the midlatitude flow, and discuss potential biases in analyses and forecasts as they relate to tropical-extratropical interaction.