Tuesday, 13 January 2004: 8:30 AM
Progress and Challenges in Subseasonal Prediction
Room 6C
While substantial advances have occurred over the last few decades in both
weather and seasonal prediction, progress in improving predictions on
subseasonal time scales (approximately 2 weeks to 2 months)
has been slow. In this talk I will highlight some of the recent progress that has been
made to improve forecasts on subseasonal time scales and outline the challenges
that we face both from an observational and modeling prespective. The talk will
be based primarily on the results and conclusions of a recent NASA-sponsored workshop
that focused on the subseasonal prediction problem. One of the key conclusions of that
workshop was that there is compelling evidence for predictability at forecast lead times
substantially longer than two weeks, and that much of that predictability is
currently untapped. Tropical diabatic heating and soil wetness were singled
out as particularly important processes affecting predictability on these time scales.
Predictability was also linked to various low-frequency atmospheric phenomena such as
the annular modes in high latitudes (including their connections to the stratosphere),
the Pacific/North American pattern, and the Madden-Julian Osciallion.
I will end the talk by summarizing the recommendations and plans that have been put
forward for accelerating progress on the subseaosnal prediction problem.
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