Multiscale Convective Organization and the YOTC Virtual Global Field Campaign
The Year of Tropical Convection (YOTC) project recognizes that major improvements are needed in how the tropics are represented in climate models. Tropical convection is organized into multiscale precipitation systems with an underlying chaotic order. These organized systems act as building blocks for meteorological events at the intersection of weather and climate (time scales up to seasonal). These events affect a large percentage of the world's population. Much of the uncertainty associated with weather and climate derives from incomplete understanding of how meteorological systems on the mesoscale (~1–100 km), synoptic scale (~1,000 km), and planetary scale (~10,000 km) interact with each other. This uncertainty complicates attempts to predict high-impact phenomena associated with the tropical atmosphere, such as tropical cyclones, the Madden–Julian oscillation, convectively coupled tropical waves, and the monsoons. These and other phenomena influence the extratropics by migrating out of the tropics a...