The goal of this session is to organize a joint forum for the wide range of communities concerned with atmospheric convection and its various aspects: both dynamics and chemistry, especially emphasizing the importance of cloud physics and radiation. It is intended to bring together observers, modelers, forecasters, and theoreticians. Moist convection is the most important weather phenomenon in the tropical atmosphere and the crucial component in large-scale processes such as monsoons, Madden-Julian Oscillation, ENSO. Its contribution to surface rainfall in the mid-latitudes during summer is significant. Forecasting intense precipitation events strongly hinges on our understanding of moist convection. Atmospheric convection is also a key process which controls the tropospheric composition above 5 km through vertical transport and wet deposition. The improvement of wet deposition and scavenging parameterizations are a key issue for large-scale models. A wide range of contributions will be accepted not only from those directly dealing with moist convection, but also from those studying mesoscale processes where convection plays a significant role, as well as tropical and mid-latitude cyclones, tropical meteorology, and climate dynamics.

Contributions of the results from the project "Year of Tropical Convection" (August 2008-July 2009) are much anticipated. This year, this session is planned to be organized back-to-back with the session "Vertical and Long-Range Transport of Trace Gases and Aerosols" in order to emphasize a link of this session with the atmospheric chemistry transport processes.