The American Meteorological Society's NYC/Long Island Chapter Seminar Series, sponsored by Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, is proud to present a lecture by Prof. Adam Scaife.

Prof. Scaife will present a talk on "Bridging the gap between weather forecasts and climate change projections."

Weather forecasts and climate projections have matured scientifically to the point where they now deliver a multitude of regular services but the availability of skillful predictions for the timescale in between, from months to a few years ahead, is much more limited. Nevertheless, there would be great benefit to society if skillful predictions were possible, as many government and private business users assess risk and make plans on this timescale. While long range forecasts for the tropics have been established for many years, studies have suggested that it may not be possible to provide anything more than a broad range of plausible impending climate states for many other regions due to the apparent dominance of internal and unpredictable climate variability. Here we show recent seasonal and decadal prediction results from the Met Office Hadley Centre. Unlike climate projections which rely only on boundary forcing, or weather forecasts which rely only on initial conditions, these predictions are made using a new state-of-the-art high resolution climate model which is both forced with boundary conditions (e.g. greenhouse gases) and initialized with latest observations (in the atmosphere, ocean and land surface). Significant and potentially useful long range forecast skill is demonstrated, even for the extratropics in some seasons. We describe some of the predictable factors and mechanisms by which this comes about and describe some of the emerging services that will help to bridge the gap between future weather and climate services.