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Overview of Weather and Climate Systems

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Handbook of Hydrometeorological Ensemble Forecasting

Abstract

Weather and climate phenomena develop as part of the coupled ocean-atmosphere-land-ice system. To understand the nature of the coupled system and its constituent processes, as well as the basis for and the limits of their predictability, some important concepts are reviewed, including determinism, chaotic error growth, and linear as well as nonlinear perturbation dynamics. It is shown that weather is predictable but only for finite times. Initial and model errors amplify, eventually rendering weather and climate forecasts useless. First, skill is lost in forecasts of fine-scale features while larger-scale phenomena remain predictable for longer periods of time. Processes and other characteristics associated with different scales of motion are discussed next, proceeding from the finest to the largest, coupled global-scale ocean-atmosphere phenomena. The potential use of ensemble forecast techniques to quantify scale and case-dependent predictability in the context of hydrologic forecasting is emphasized throughout.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Atmospheric Sciences and Key Laboratory of Mesoscale Severe Weather, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Huiling Yuan

  2. Global Systems Division, Earth System Research Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/OAR, Boulder, CO, USA

    Zoltan Toth

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Malaquias Peña

  4. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Eugenia Kalnay

Authors
  1. Huiling Yuan
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  2. Zoltan Toth
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  3. Malaquias Peña
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  4. Eugenia Kalnay
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Huiling Yuan or Zoltan Toth .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Qingyun Duan

  2. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, ECMWF, Reading, UK

    Florian Pappenberger

  3. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Andy Wood

  4. Department of Meteorology, Reading University, Reading, UK

    Hannah L. Cloke

  5. U.S. National Weather Service (retired), Annapolis, MD, USA

    John C. Schaake

Section Editor information

  1. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

    Huiling Yuan

  2. Global Systems Division, Earth System Research Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Zoltan Toth

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Yuan, H., Toth, Z., Peña, M., Kalnay, E. (2019). Overview of Weather and Climate Systems. In: Duan, Q., Pappenberger, F., Wood, A., Cloke, H., Schaake, J. (eds) Handbook of Hydrometeorological Ensemble Forecasting. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39925-1_10

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