Seasonal and Subseasonal Climate Index Monitoring, Forecasts, and Analysis in the World Climate Service

The World Climate Service is a web-based portal enabling improved long-range forecasts in the seasonal to subseasonal timeframe. A key capability of any subseasonal to seasonal forecasting process includes monitoring, forecasting, and understanding the impact of a wide range climate indices. The World Climate Service includes capabilities to monitor the Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere and tropical climate indices. It also includes forecasts of climate indices in the medium, subseasonal, and seasonal time scale from various numerical prediction models, including NOAA’s CFSv2 and GEFS, the ECMWF EPS, ENS-E, and SEAS5 models, and those available from the Copernicus program. Finally, analog climate analysis tools are included, enabling users to quickly query historical data to estimate the probability of climate anomalies that may result from a wide range of climate index variations.

The presentation will cover the high-level methodologies employed to enable this comprehensive climate-index and impact monitoring service. The importance of calculating index values from the original data sources wherever possible will be discussed. Finally, the presentation will provide product examples and discuss future plans.