Abstract
In response to the high demand for more skillful climate forecasts at the seasonal timescale, innovative climate prediction systems are developed with improved physics and increased spatial resolution. Alongside the model development process, seasonal predictions need to be evaluated on past years to provide robust information on the forecast performance. This work presents the quality assessment of the Météo-France coupled climate prediction system, taking advantage of an experiment performed with 90 ensemble members over a 37-year re-forecast period from 1979 to 2015. We focus on the boreal winter season initialised in November. Beyond typical skill measures we evaluate the model capability in reproducing ENSO and NAO teleconnections on precipitation and near surface temperature respectively. Such an assessment is carried out first through a composite analysis, and shows that the model succeeds in reproducing the main patterns for near surface temperature and precipitation. A covariance method leads to consistent results. Finally we find that the teleconnection representation of the model is not affected by shortening the verification period and reducing the ensemble size and therefore can be used to evaluate operational seasonal forecast systems.
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Notes
The first two domains, SAFR and SEA are selected following the geographical definition of Giorgi and Francisco (2000), while the last domain EBR is chosen selecting an area with observed signal of N3.4 over precipitation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge funding support for this study from Copernicus Climate Change Service (project C3S-433) and the MEDSCOPE project under the European Research Area for Climate Services (ERA4CS) co-funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union (Grant agreement 690462). During the revision of the manuscript the author D.V. was founded by the H2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie project LISTEN (Grant agreement 799930). GPCP Precipitation data are provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. ERA-Interim data are provided by the ECMWF, Reading, UK from their Web site at http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/. The authors acknowledge the useful suggestions and technical support of Constantin Ardilouze and Laurent Dorel. We acknowledge the s2dverification R-language-based software package (Manubens et al. 2018) developers, as this package was used for the data analysis and the visualization of the results presented in this work.
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Volpi, D., Batté, L., Guérémy, JF. et al. Teleconnection-based evaluation of seasonal forecast quality. Clim Dyn 55, 1353–1365 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05327-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05327-x