Unified Prediction of Weather and Climate

In the early 1990s, Peter Webster and the author co-wrote one of the first (if not the first) paper advocating a unified approach to weather and climate prediction. However, for political reasons the paper was only published in an obscure conference proceedings book, and has received few citations. However, in the intervening years unified (or seamless as it is now largely referred to) prediction has become a dominant strategic theme of major meteorological institutes and programmes such as WCRP. Here I discuss some of the most important reasons for pursuing a unified approach to weather and climate prediction, and argue that the need for a unified approach has never been more important, as we start to develop convectively resolved global climate models.