Abstract
Research in several centres suggests that sea-surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) have a strong influence on seasonal circulation in the tropics (e.g. Nicholls 1987; Shukla and Fennessy 1988; Folland et al. 1991; Ward and Folland 1991). Motivated by this suggestion, real-time experimental forecasts of seasonal rainfall in the Sahel region of North Africa have been made by the UK Met. Office since 1986, and for the north Nordeste region of Brazil since 1987, a total of eleven such forecasts. The forecasts use the SSTAs 1-3 months before the main rainfall season to predict the rainfall total for that season. This paper first discusses the nature of the links between SSTAs and rainfall in the two forecast regions (section 2). Next we discuss the methods used to make the rainfall forecasts, and the amount of skill that the methods show on historical data (section 3). Forecasts that are made on historical data for the purpose of evaluating the forecast methods are referred to as hindcasts; the term forecast is reserved for the issued real-time forecasts. Section 4 discusses issues regarding the production of forecasts in real-time, and verifies eleven real-time seasonal rainfall forecasts. A forecast may fail if the large-scale SSTA patterns change significantly from the time the forecast is made to the time of the peak rainfall season. Section 5 therefore discusses preliminary work aimed at statistically predicting the evolution of SSTAs over a few months.
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ward, M.N., Folland, C.K., Maskell, K., Colman, A.W., Rowell, D.P., Lane, K.B. (1993). Experimental Seasonal Forecasting of Tropical Rainfall at the UK Meteorological Office. In: Shukla, J. (eds) Prediction of Interannual Climate Variations. NATO ASI Series, vol 6. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76960-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76960-3_11
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