A barotropic version of the TIGAR (Transient Inertia-Gravity And Rossby wave dynamics) model has been run at T170 resolution to simulate the effect of tropical heat sources mimicking convection in different realistic background flows. The heat source was treated as a forcing of the continuity equation. The background flows include seasonal mean zonally-averaged zonal wind from 1993, 1999, 2009, 2012 and 2016 derived from ERA5. TIGAR solves the rotating shallow water equations by applying Hough harmonics as spectral basis functions thereby enabling the analysis of Rossby and Inertia-gravity wave dynamics. More details of the model are available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.4006 .