Understanding Tropical Convection and its Mesoscale Organization: The Vital Role of 50 years of Field Campaigns

January 28, 2021

Edward Zipser from the University of Utah

Hosted by Steven Rutledge

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, with the encouragement of President John F. Kennedy for the U.S. taking a leadership role in Science (also leading to the moon landing in the same decade), the Charney Report highlighted the need to understand and parameterize tropical convection if global models were to approach their potential of useful 1-2-week weather prediction. Stimulated by Verner Suomi promising (and delivering) Geosynchronous weather satellites, a series of field campaigns to obtain useful real data over the tropical oceans led to the massive Global Atmospheric Research Program's Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE) in 1974. From the perspective of a then-young Post-Doctoral participant, this talk recalls some of the successes and bumps in the road of that period, outlines some of the major accomplishments, but concludes by pointing out important problems yet unsolved today, a challenge for today's students.