Toward Actionable Predictability of Tropical Mesoscale Convective Systems through Large-scale Recurrent Environments in Northern South America

Abstract

Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) produce much of the extreme precipitation, floods, and landslides that affect northern South America (NOSA), yet remain difficult to anticipate because they are strongly governed by local processes. On the night of 31 March 2017, an MCS triggered a catastrophic flash flood in Mocoa, Colombia ---an event whose severity was not foreseen with sufficient lead time for emergency action, which typically requires several hours to a couple of days. Motivated by this disaster, this study investigates whether such events emerge within recurrent environments that provide a source of large-scale predictability, rather than as isolated and inherently unpredictable occurrences. We combine a 21-year (2001--2021) MCS tracking dataset, ERA5 reanalysis, equatorial Rossby (ER) wave diagnostics, and a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to identify recurrent environments associated with MCS occurrence in the Orinoco--Amazon basin. The Mocoa environment maps onto one of nine recurrent configurations characterized by enhanced low-level moisture, neutral Orinoco low-level jet conditions, favorable upper-level circulation, and strong ER-wave activity. We further trace convective precursors to an upstream source region over the Guiana Highlands up to 24~h before arrival in the Mocoa region. Together, these results show that the Mocoa event was not climatologically exceptional but a high-impact expression of a recurrent, partly predictable large-scale regime, demonstrating that portion of MCS predictability arise from recurring large-scale conditions that can be monitored hours to days in advance, and support hazardous weather forecasting in NOSA and other tropical regions.