On the reliability of Seasonal Climate Forecasts

2013/10/12 by Antje Weisheimer, T. N. Palmer, Weisheimer, Antje +1 · 3 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Climate change #Climate model #Climate variability and models #Climatology #Consensus forecast #Econometrics #Economics #Environmental science #FOS: Physical sciences #Geography #Mathematics #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #Meteorology #Precipitation #Probabilistic logic #Range (aeronautics) #Reliability (semiconductor) #Scale (ratio) #Statistics #physics.ao-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1310.3401

arxiv created 2013/10/12 · openalex publication_date 2013/10/12 · arxiv updated 2013/10/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

Seasonal climate forecasts are being used increasingly across a range of application sectors. A recent UK governmental report asked: How good are seasonal climate forecasts on a scale of 1-5 (where 5 is very good), and how good can we expect them to be in 30 years time? Seasonal climate forecasts are made from ensembles of integrations of numerical models of climate. We argue that goodness should be assessed primarily in terms of the probabilistic reliability of these ensemble-based forecasts and that a 5 should be reserved for systems which are not only reliable overall, but where, in particular, small ensemble spread is a reliable indicator of low ensemble forecast error. We study the reliability of regional temperature and precipitation forecasts of the current operational seasonal forecast system of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, universally regarded as a world leading operational institute producing seasonal climate forecasts. A wide range of goodness rankings, depending on region and variable (with summer forecasts of rainfall over Northern Europe performing exceptionally poorly) is found. Finally, we discuss the prospects of reaching 5 across all regions and variables in 30 years time.

Cited by

• Contextualising seasonal forecasts to accelerate their uptake for agricultural decision-making
• Weather Jiu-Jitsu: Climate Adaptation for the 21st Century
• AI-Informed Model Analogs for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Prediction

Related

• State-space modeling of intra-seasonal persistence in daily climate indices: a data-driven approach for seasonal forecasting
• Multivariate post-processing of probabilistic sub-seasonal weather regime forecasts
• Evaluation of a New Precipitation-Based Index for Global Seasonal Forecasting of Unusually Wet and Dry Periods
• Improving the expected accuracy of forecasts of future climate using a simple bias-variance tradeoff
• Data-driven Seasonal Climate Predictions via Variational Inference and Transformers