DEVELOPMENT OF A EUROPEAN MULTIMODEL ENSEMBLE SYSTEM FOR SEASONAL-TO-INTERANNUAL PREDICTION (DEMETER)

摘要

Ensembles of leading European global coupied climate models show impressive reliabilityfor seasonal climate prediction--including useful output for probabilistic predictionof malaria incidence and crop yield. Seasonal time-scale climate predictions ate now made routinely at a number of operational meteorological centers around the world, using comprehensive coupled models of the atmosphere, oceans, and land surface (e. g.,Stockdale et al. 1998; Mason et al. 1999; Kanamitsu et al. 2002; Alves et al. 2002). This development can be traced back to a revolution in our understanding of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system in the second half of the twentieth century (Neelin et al. 1998), to the development and deployment of specialized buoys to observe and measure the evolution of near-surface waters in the tropical Pacific (McPhaden et al 1998), and, most importantly, to successful predictions of El Nino by prototype coupled ocean-atmosphere models (Zebiak and Cane 1987). In turn, these developments were fostered by the outstandingly successful international Tiopical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program (World Climate Research Programme 1985).