Background and Workshop Goals
Fundamental theoretical and modeling breakthroughs over the last decade and a half have engendered profound advances in our understanding of tropical dynamics. Weak temperature and pressure gradient theory has matured, enabling novel modeling and diagnostic approaches for understanding interactions between tropical convection and the large-scale circulation. Such theory has also clarified the fundamental role of moisture to the dynamics of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), and has catalyzed new research on how cumulus parameterizations might be modified to produce more realistic sensitivity to free tropospheric humidity. Exciting MJO theories have also developed that invoke multiscale interactions as critical to the destabilization and propagation of the MJO. Global cloud system resolving models and related novel modeling approaches (e.g. superparameterization) have freed us from the need to parameterize certain processes, resulting in fundamentally improved simulations of the tropical atmosphere in key respects that can be used to guide development of conventional models.
At the same time that fundamental modeling and theoretical advances have been made, the tropical dynamics and wider climate communities have coalesced around new organizational and conceptual frameworks that have the potential to accelerate understanding of the Tropics. The NSF Science and Technology Center CMMAP has fostered collaborations across the university and national laboratory modeling communities that have engendered a quantum leap forward in global model capability. Recent theoretical advances have provided impetus for development of process-oriented diagnostics of the tropical atmosphere that verify theory, provide basic understanding, and can be used to improve global models. Inspired by related efforts under the GEWEX Global Atmospheric System Studies (GASS) panel, the WGNE MJO Task Force has been developing process-oriented model diagnostics that provide insight into why some climate models produce good simulations of the MJO and why some do not. The convergence of new modeling approaches and theoretical thinking, coupled with a rich new observational dataset, has the potential to accelerate our fundamental advances of the tropical atmosphere, including interactions with the ocean.
Based on the motivation above, a workshop was organized that brought together PIs and their graduate students and postdocs across multiple U.S. and international national laboratories and universities to present recent insights and future directions on tropical dynamics, including theoretical, modeling, observational, and diagnostic approaches. The specific goals of the workshop were to:
1) Discuss and synthesize recent theoretical, modeling, and diagnostic breakthroughs related to tropical dynamics
2) To survey remaining challenges and roadblocks to improving our understanding of tropical dynamics
3) To discuss the optimal paths forward for the community to address such challenges.
Funding to support travel for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers was provided. Interactions between these young researchers and leaders of the tropical meteorology field formed a core dynamic of the workshop.