US CLIVAR: Workshop on Societally-Relevant Multi-Year Climate Predictions - ### POSTPONED ###

Anfang 31. Mär 2020 08:30
Ende 02. Apr 2020 12:00
Dauer 3 days
Ort Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.

To stimulate research into developing useful multi-year climate predictions, by identifying what can be predicted, what might be predictable, and what needs predicting for a time horizon beyond a year.

Objectives

Seasonal predictability research focuses on time scales less than a year, when both initialization and boundary forcing from sea, land, and ice provide operational forecast skill. About a decade ago, driven by high demands from stakeholders and policymakers, a few large modeling centers began a sustained effort to address “near-term” or decadal prediction of averages over several years (e.g., forecasts of Years 1-10, Years 2-5, Years 6-9 means), hoping to exploit the potential for skill revealed by many years of observational and modeling studies into decadal time-scale processes, both within the climate system and externally forced. While the seasonal and decadal prediction communities hypothetically have some overlap at these “near-term” scales, their focus tends to be greatest at opposite timescales (i.e., a few weeks to months versus many years to decades), leveraging different sources of predictability. The fast growth of the field of decadal prediction has, however, led to something of a research and operations gap in the intermediate time scales, which range from more than a few seasons to less than a few years, despite clear evidence of both societal and scientific interest in improved understanding and forecast skill on this multi-year time scale as well.

• Advance scientific understanding of multi-year predictability
• Characterize physical and dynamical processes in the coupled climate system, including the oceans, land surface, and cryosphere, that can be exploited to improve multi-year forecasts
• Highlight the challenges for producing skillful multi-year predictions with state-of-the-art earth system models
• Construct a framework to identify user requirements for multi-year predictions that will help inform predictability research and model development
• Identify knowledge gaps, determine future research direction and foster new initiatives and collaborations by bringing together research, operational, and applications community
• Assess specific observational needs for improving multi-year predictions that are not currently met
• Identify prototype applications of multi-year forecasts and assess their utility

Since year-to-year forecasts likely will have limited skill on average, knowing ahead of time when to have high confidence in the predicted outcomes is essential; that is, each forecast includes an assessment of its expected skill. Moreover, useful forecasts lie at the intersection of what can be predicted and what needs to be predicted, so applications of predictability research should consider user needs as well. The interaction of the prediction, predictability, and user communities at the outset of setting a multi-year prediction research agenda is fundamental to achieving the goals of this workshop.

The workshop will bring together scientists and stakeholders engaged in the modeling and forecasting communities as well as the private sector. The Organizing Committee anticipates that around 100 participants will attend and that participation from graduate students and early career scientists will be high as this is a potentially new, largely underexplored area of research.

Read more at US Climate Variability and Predictability Program’s website (Program, registration, …)

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