GC31D-03:
Activities of the Climate Forecast Unit (CFU) on regional decadal prediction

Wednesday, 17 December 2014: 8:30 AM
Chloé Prodhomme1, Francisco Doblas-Reyes1, Virginie Guemas1, Danila Volpi1,2, Louis-Philippe Caron1, Melanie Davis1, Martin Menegoz3, Ramiro I Saurral4 and Omar Bellprat1, (1)Institut Català de Ciències del Clima, Barcelona, Spain, (2)University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom, (3)LGGE Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement, Saint Martin d'Hères, France, (4)Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera (CONICET-UBA), UMI IFAECI/CNRS, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Abstract:
The Climate Forecasting Unit (CFU) is a research unit devoted to develop climate forecast systems to contribute to the creation of climate services that aims to 1) develop climate forecast systems and prediction methodologies, 2) investigate the potential sources of skill and understand the limitation of state-of-the-art forecast systems, 3) formulate reliable climate forecasts that meet specific user needs and 4) contribute to the development of climate services. This presentation will provide an overview of the latest results of this research unit in the field of regional decadal prediction focusing on 1) an assessment of the relative merits of the full-field and the anomaly initialisation techniques, 2) a description of the forecast quality of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity and South Pacific climate, 3) an evaluation of the impact of volcanic aerosol prescription during decadal forecasts, and 4) the strategy for the development of a climate service to ensure that forecasts are both useful and action-oriented. Results from several European projects, SPECS, PREFACE and EUPORIAS, will be used to illustrate these findings.