Icon NARVAL simulation over the tropical Atlantic for the AFR subdomain, the simulation day is 2016-08-01, extracted from NARVAL2 simulations

Icon 2.5 km simulations over the tropical Atlantic ([65W:15E],[10S:20N] for the months of December 2013 (NARVAL1: 30 days) and August 2016 (NARVAL2: 30 days). The grid spacing, computed as the square root of the triangular grid cells, amounts to 2.5 km. In the vertical, a stretched vertical coordinate is used with 75 layers, whereby 12 layers are located in the first kilometer. The simulations are conducted for the months of December 2013 and July 2016. They are started every day at 00 UTC from the analysis of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and integrated for 36 hours. Boundary data are taken from the ECMWF forecasts and updated every 3 hours. At the bottom boundary, the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is taken from the ECMWF analysis. It is kept fixed at its initial value during the 36-h integration period. The simulations were conducted using the ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic (ICON) model (Zängl et al., 2015). Given the horizontal grid spacing, no convective parameterisation is employed and convection is explicitly resolved by the bulk microphysics scheme that predicts cloud water, rain, snow, ice and Graupel (Baldauf et al., 2011). The parameterisations for gravity wave drag and subgrid-scale orography are also switched off, otherwise the model employs the same parameterisations as the operational model version in use at the German Weather Service (DWD), see Zängl et al. (2015) and Klocke et al. (2017) for further details.