Weather Science Innovation: Lessons Learnt from the Polar Prediction Project

Anthropogenic climate change in recent years has directed the public’s attention to the changing weather, climate and ice conditions in polar regions. Ongoing change in the Arctic and Antarctic comes with new opportunities such as for transportation, tourism, fisheries, and natural resource exploitation. To minimize associated risks and support decision-making, however, enhanced human activities in polar regions call for improved forecasts of weather and environmental conditions. Yet, the current gaps in polar weather forecasting hamper reliable decision-making by many stakeholders operating in polar regions.

To address this challenge, the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP) has been initiated by the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The core phase of YOPP is scheduled from mid-2017 to mid-2019 as the key activity of the decade-long Polar Prediction Project (PPP). Both PPP and YOPP aim to significantly advance our environmental prediction capabilities on a wide range of time scales from hours to seasons for the polar regions and beyond. Fostering intensive observing, modelling, prediction, verification, user-engagement and education activities, YOPP promotes interactions and communication between academia, operational centers, and stakeholders.

In this presentation, PPP and YOPP will be introduced; an overview of previous, ongoing and future activities will be given; and the lessons learnt thus far will be highlighted.