This meeting brought together 32 national and international scientists who are members of the Decadal Climate Prediction Project. The aim of this project is to further the understanding of climate prediction on shorter time scales. As opposed to traditional climate prediction that focuses on century-long time scales, this project will attempt to address climate change on annual to decadal time scales.
While this new field of decadal climate prediction has seen rapid advances, there is still a lack of understanding regarding processes and mechanisms that control predictions on decadal timescales. A range of experiments and studies have been proposed by the meeting participants to help coordinate further developments. There are high expectations for this new field of decadal climate prediction from the stakeholder and policy-maker communities. Improving our understanding is essential for producing useful, near-term climate information that will inform decisions for the next decade.
The new field of decadal climate prediction has seen rapid advances in quantifying predictive skill in space and time, and the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) multi-model decadal hindcasts have enabled much of this work (Kirtman et al. 2013). However, there is still a lack of understanding regarding processes and mechanisms that could produce prediction skill on decadal timescales. The WCRP Decadal Climate Prediction Panel (DCPP, George Boer, chair), a joint committee between the Working Group on Coupled Models (WGCM) and the Working Group on Seasonal to Interannual Prediction (WGSIP), is currently promoting various types of idealized experiments and diagnostic studies to address this problem by individual scientists and groups. This AGCI workshop will bring together the scientists performing these studies to compare their results and formulate productive coordinated experiments that can become part of the experiment design for the decadal prediction experiment for CMIP6.
There are high expectations for the new field of decadal climate prediction from the stakeholder and policy-maker communities (Meehl et al. 2009; Meehl et al. 2013). To live up to those expectations, the decadal climate prediction community must improve the capabilities of decadal climate predictions, and to do that there is a need for a much better understanding of the processes and mechanisms in the climate system that produce decadal climate variability. Improving understanding of these processes and mechanisms is the way forward for producing near-term climate information that is usable for a variety of real world applications.
This talk gives an overview of the challenging field of the decadal climate prediction and the future direction that the global scientific community is pursuing.
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