The expansion and contraction of the eastern edge of the warm pool (eewp) occurs over a broad range of timescales, both responding to and driving changes in the distribution and organization of…

The expansion and contraction of the eastern edge of the warm pool (eewp) occurs over a broad range of timescales, both responding to and driving changes in the distribution and organization of tropical convection including mesoscale convective systems, convectively coupled equatorial waves, and the madden-julian oscillation. This push and pull between organized convection and eewp SST rectifies onto longer timescales, influencing the development, evolution, and cessation of enso. Despite notable progress towards improving model representation of organized convection, realistically representing the interactions between organized convection and eewp migration remains challenging for models, which are subject to rapidly developing biases across the air-sea transition zone. The persistent nature of these biases and systematic errors highlights the ongoing need for process studies that can provide targeted, actionable guidance to model developers and strategic planners (e.g., NOAA ppgc strategy objectives 3-6, actions 3.2, 4.1, 5.3, and 6.2). We propose to address the objectives of this competition by: launching 8 rawinsondes per day for a i-month period from a NOAA research vessel supporting the development and implementation of the tepex-c observational strategy by providing forecast outlooks and real-time variability assessments, both preceding and during the field campaign, using a suite of products including unified forecast system (UFS) fully coupled global forecasts providing a retrospective assessment of convective organization during the tepex-c field campaign using satellite data, tepex-c observations, and reanalysis analyzing atmosphere-ocean coupled budgets of heat and moisture, informed and constrained by collocated and coincident tepex-c observations spanning the air-sea transition zone