Seamless Prediction Capability for Information about Extremes from Weather to Climate Timescales

Catastrophic weather events such as the 2017 destructive Atlantic hurricanes, and the economic damages they impose compel an acceleration of practical tools to provide trustworthy, predictive information to stakeholders, risk assessors, first responders, social scientists, and decision-makers, for the purposes of reducing the impacts due to extreme weather. Under the Department of Commerce’s Strategic Objective (3.3) to reduce Extreme Weather Impacts, NOAA Research is developing a state-of-the-art modeling capability to deliver improved forecasts and timely warnings of high-impact weather that can better inform planning, resources management, and investment decisions. A novel atmospheric model, based on an innovative mathematical technique (“FV3”), captures the realism of the recent tropical storms and is now a part of the NOAA Next-Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS), with operational weather forecasts from early next year. During the 2017 hurricane season, the NGGPS model’s prototype forecasts performed extremely well in predicting the track, intensity, and precipitation extremes accompanying the major hurricanes. This information represent a significant improvement over the older operational system. The new modeling system has been tested for prediction of hurricane frequency on timescales extending beyond weather to climate. This is part of a seamless modeling enterprise at NOAA Research to obtain prediction of storms with better fidelity e.g., Atlantic hurricane frequencies over sub-seasonal, seasonal, and longer timescales. The capability has also been tested regarding other severe environmental stresses such as winter storms in the northeast, extreme precipitation in the southeast, sea-level rise and coastal inundation, droughts in the southwest including ENSO periods, atmospheric river episodes and snow-pack in mountain west, and summertime heatwaves in central US. The virtue of a seamless system to deliver credible information on severe phenomena of societal significance across timescales is a transformative change in weather and climate science-based predictions. The unprecedented development seeks to enable both short- and long-term actionable information and data to be assembled for building improved resilience to extremes, and for society to be better prepared in reducing extreme weather impacts.