Combination of decadal predictions and climate projections in time: challenges and potential solutions

Befort, D. J., Brunner, L., Borchert, L. F., O'Reilly, C. H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8630-1650, Mignot, J., Ballinger, A. P., Hegerl, G. C., Murphy, J. M. and Weisheimer, A. (2022) Combination of decadal predictions and climate projections in time: challenges and potential solutions. Geophysical Research Letters, 49 (15). e2022GL098568. ISSN 0094-8276 doi: 10.1029/2022GL098568

Abstract/Summary

This study presents an approach to provide seamless climate information by concatenating decadal climate predictions and climate projections in time. Results for near-surface air temperature over 29 regions indicate that such an approach has potential to provide meaningful information but can also introduce significant inconsistencies. Inconsistencies are often most pronounced for relatively extreme quantiles of the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble distribution, whereas they are generally smaller and mostly insignificant for quantiles close to the median. The regions most affected are the North Atlantic, Greenland and Northern Europe. Two potential ways to reduce inconsistencies are discussed, including a simple calibration method and a weighting approach based on model performance. Calibration generally reduces inconsistencies but does not eliminate all of them. The impact of model weighting is minor, which is found to be linked to the small size of the decadal climate prediction ensemble, which in turn limits the applicability of that method.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/106812
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	American Geophysical Union
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