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Three different coupled modeling systems have been developed and improved at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The first modeling system is the improved GCE that has been developed and improved at Goddard over last two decades. The GCE model has recently been enhanced in its ability to simulate the impact of atmospheric aerosol concentrations on precipitation processes and the impact of land and ocean surface processes on convective systems in different geographic locations. The improved GCE model has also been coupled with a NASA TRMM microwave radiative transfer model and precipitation radar model to simulate satellite - observed brightness temperatures at different frequencies. This new, coupled GCE allows us to better understand cloud processes in the Tropics as well as to improve the precipitation retrieved from NASA satellites.

The second modeling system couples the NASA Goddard finite volume GCM (fvGCM) with the Goddard Cumulus Ensemble model (GCE), a CRM. The use of the fvGCM allows for global coverage and the use of the GCE allows for the explicit simulation of cloud processes and their interactions with radiation and surface processes. This modeling system has been applied and its performance tested for two different climate scenarios, El Niño (1998) and La Niña (1999). The coupled new modeling system produces more realistic propagation and intensities of tropical rainfall systems and intraseasonal oscillations and an improved diurnal variation of precipitation: all are very difficult to forecast even using state-of-the-art GCMs.

The third modeling system couples various NASA Goddard physical packages (i.e., microphysics, radiation and land surface process) into a next generation weather forecast model (called the Weather and Research Forecast model or WRF.) The coupled new modeling system enables better forecasts (or simulations) of convective systems [e.g., a mesoscale convective system (MCS) in Oklahoma or a typhoon in the West Pacific]. WRF has also been modified so that it can be initialized with the high-resolution fvGCM.