Navascues, Beatriz (Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia, Madrid, Spain)
Garcia-Moya, J. A. (same affiliation)
Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is one of the main factors influencing Mediterranean meteorological events. In particular, convective situations with large amount of precipitation in just a few hours take place almost every Autumn in Spain. What is relevant for such behaviour is the fact that the Mediterranean is a quasi-closed sea with water warmer than air above. Then, latent and sensible heat fluxes at surface make the air conditionally unstable and feeds convective systems.
From the point of view of numerical models is quite important to have SST fields as updated as possible to supply the right forcing to the model physical parameterizations (in particular convection).
The Hirlam group has recently developped a SST analysis using the ECMWF ST analysis (NMC data) as pseudoobservations. The goodness of this analysis was showed in cases of strong winter situationes in Northern Europe. The goal of this presentation is to study the usefulness of this analysis to improve precipitation forecast made with the Hirlam system in convective situations.
Also a few sensitivity experiments about the influence of SST values in convection was carried out.