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The interaction between the Earths surface and the atmosphere plays a keyrole in the initiation of cumulus convection. Over the land surface, anecessary boundary condition to consider for resolving land-atmosphereinteractions is soil moisture. The aim in the study is twofold. One, throughobject oriented and traditional verification techniques determine how higherresolution soil moisture initial conditions influences the prediction of thelocation and timing of convective initiation (CI) within a convectivepermitting, operational NWP model over South Africa. Two, to study the modelledCI-soil moisture relationship during real afternoon thunderstorm events. Thestudy reports the results from 66 Unified Model simulations (at 4.4km gridresolution) for nine summer afternoon CI events during synoptically benignconditions over South Africa. The higher resolution soil moisture conditionsreduce centroid distance between observed and forecast storms on average by 7km(9 percent improvement), with the most decrease in centroid distance occurringat the shortest lead times, by 12km. Most improvement in location error occursin the zonal directional. However, little to no difference is found in thetiming of CI, most likely attributable to the dominant effect of model gridsize on CI timing, overshadowing the influence from soil moisture anomalies.Probability of CI is highest over dry and moderate soils and areas alongdistinct soil moisture gradients. The conclusion is that modelled CI over SouthAfrica preferentially occurs on the periphery of wet soil moisture patches,where there is increased surface convergence of wind and higher sensible heatflux.

The Impact of High-Resolution Soil Moisture States on Short-Term Numerical Weather Prediction of Convective Initiation over South Africa