Happy new year to everyone - hope 2008 is a smashing one for all. It looks like it will be a busy and exciting year from the perspective of our working group.

1. General issues

• I have tried to update the web page www.convection.info but feel free to tell me if there are areas you feel should be updated
• We have had several new people sign up to this mail list in the last few months. Welcome to them. Remember you can easily remove yourself from this list - simply follow the instructions from the web page www.convection.info
• Don't forget that the 4th Pan-GCSS meeting is in Toulouse, June 2-6th. Further details from here - I will be in touch about what we will discuss at our break-out sessions.

2. Case 5 TWP simulations progress

This work is moving along nicely. A paper has appeared in QJ last year which describes the design of the case study (see here). Two further papers describing multi model comparisons are well on their way. One paper will describing NWP and climate models has just been submitted. Another describing CRMs and SCMs is close to submission. Many thanks to Martin Willett, Steve Woolnough and all the participants for their on-going work.

Many plots are available from GCSS PCCS web page from both these areas of work (www.convection.info).

3. Future work - Convection over land and the ocean - understanding key differences

Based on feedback from my message back in June and discussions with some of you, the upcoming work of the group will focus on a theme of Convection over land and oceans and understanding key differences; this will include considering issues such as the role of microphysics and aerosols as well as the large scale driving of this convection. There is also a drive to investigate the role of convection on the TTL within future cases, in collaboration with the SPARC community.

Clearly we have some past cases we can look back on to consider some aspects of this. However, looking forward, our plans are as follows:

• I am very pleased to say that Ann Fridlind (CRMs) and Christian Jacob (SCMs) will lead a model comparison case based around TWP- ICE. This will be jointly coordinated with the ARM cloud modelling group. I also hope to soon have a volunteer to coordinate an NWP/Climate model component of this work as we had for case 5. There will be significant analysis related to microphysics in this case, and hopefully involvement from people running bin resolved microphysics. Ann and Christian also aim to design the case such that the model tops and the forcing allow analysis of the TTL region.
• In parallel to the TWP-ICE work Wojtek Grabowski has been designing an idealised case specifically to study the role of convection on the TTL.
• In the longer term, I hope we can follow the TWP-ICE case with a fully land-based case study based on observation made during AMMA. Planning for this is still at the early stages.

I hope there will be plenty of interest for involvement in these cases. Expect to hear much more about these in the next few months from the case coordinators. We aim to have a released forcing data etc... for the TWP-ICE and TTL cases in time to get some preliminary results from some CRMs and SCMs before the Toulouse meeting. This will aid discussion of these cases.