Second Thoughts on Skill Of El Nino Predictions

摘要

What if your high school geometry teacher called you up at grad school to tell you that, on further thought, she was dropping your grade from an A to a C+? That's what researchers are doing to the computer models that forecast a warming of the tropical Pacific early in 1997. Less than a year after the onset of one of the two strongest El Ninos of the century, researchers were awarding high marks to models that had anticipated the warming by as much as 6 months, especially the big, computationally expensive models (Science, 24 April 1998, p. 522). Now, with the complete rise and fall of El Nino available for grading—and with second thoughts about the standard to which models should be held—researchers have lowered their marks. Some critics have even failed the models.