Hagemeyer and Almeida presented the paper: “Experimental Forecasting of Dry Season Storminess Over Florida and the Southeast United States From the ENSO Signal Using Multiple Linear Regression Techniques” to the 13th Symposium on Global Change and Climate Variations in January 2002. They outlined the evolution of a philosophy and methodology for producing skillful dry season forecasts of rainfall and storminess over Florida. Their experimental seasonal forecasts were started on the Internet in the Fall of 2001 (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mlb/enso/mlbnino.html).

This paper will recap the 2001-2002 Florida dry season (1 November 2001 to 30 April 2002) and present the results of the first full season of operational experimental long-lead forecasts of storminess and rainfall and the lessons learned. The presentation will also discuss the latest advancements in the author’s efforts to improve the forecast process and communicate the forecast to decision makers. Topics covered will include, the development of an improved storminess climatology for Florida, stratification of prediction equations by storm type, and developments in the ongoing effort to express complicated climate and seasonal forecasting concepts to users via graphical visualizations on the Internet.

The authors will present a conceptual model of the possible teleconnections between ENSO and Florida and their predictability, and some ideas on theoretically how much specificity can be wrung out of the ENSO signal via statistical techniques.