Confidence Builders: Evaluating Seasonal Climate Forecasts from User Perspectives

Perspectives on Evaluating Macroeconomic Forecasts

On the reliability of seasonal climate forecasts

Seasonal climate forecasts are being used increasingly across a range of application sectors. A recent UK governmental report asked: how good are seasonal 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 forecasts are made from ensembles of integrations of numerical models of climate. We argue that 'goodness' should be assessed...

Managing Climate Risk with Seasonal Forecasts

Seasonal climate refers to average conditions in the atmosphere and ocean over time scales of the order of three months. When considering risks associated with seasonal climate we are concerned with deviations from normal conditions, or ‘climate anomalies’. Summers that are hotter than usual, extended drought conditions and exceptionally active tropical cyclone seasons are examples of seasonal ...

Intra-seasonal climate prediction - linking Weather and Climate Forecasts

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a tropical atmospheric phenomenon, associated with periods of active convection in the eastern hemisphere tropics.The MJOs temporal scale (22-90 days) coincides with a gap between weather (synoptic forecasts out to 10 days) and climate (seasonal and longer forecasts).Analysis of 35 years of daily rainfall data shows significant modulation of tropical and e...

Evaluating the performance of infectious disease forecasts: A comparison of climate-driven and seasonal dengue forecasts for Mexico

Dengue viruses, which infect millions of people per year worldwide, cause large epidemics that strain healthcare systems. Despite diverse efforts to develop forecasting tools including autoregressive time series, climate-driven statistical, and mechanistic biological models, little work has been done to understand the contribution of different components to improved prediction. We developed a f...