Search

Quantifying signals and uncertainties in climate models is essential for the detection, attribution, prediction and projection of climate change1,2,3. Although inter-model agreement is high for large-scale temperature signals, dynamical changes in atmospheric circulation are very uncertain4. This leads to low confidence in regional projections, especially for precipitation, over the coming decades5,6. The chaotic nature of the climate system7,8,9 may also mean that signal uncertainties are largely irreducible. However, climate projections are difficult to verify until further observations become available. Here we assess retrospective climate model predictions of the past six decades and show that decadal variations in North Atlantic winter climate are highly predictable, despite a lack of agreement between individual model simulations and the poor predictive ability of raw model outputs. Crucially, current models underestimate the predictable signal (the predictable fraction of the total variability) of the North Atlantic Oscillation (the leading mode of variability in North Atlantic atmospheric circulation) by an order of magnitude. Consequently, compared to perfect models, 100 times as many ensemble members are needed in current models to extract this signal, and its effects on the climate are underestimated relative to other factors. To address these limitations, we implement a two-stage post-processing technique. We first adjust the variance of the ensemble-mean North Atlantic Oscillation forecast to match the observed variance of the predictable signal. We then select and use only the ensemble members with a North Atlantic Oscillation sufficiently close to the variance-adjusted ensemble-mean forecast North Atlantic Oscillation. This approach greatly improves decadal predictions of winter climate for Europe and eastern North America. Predictions of Atlantic multidecadal variability are also improved, suggesting that the North Atlantic Oscillation is not driven solely by Atlantic multidecadal variability. Our results highlight the need to understand why the signal-to-noise ratio is too small in current climate models10, and the extent to which correcting this model error would reduce uncertainties in regional climate change projections on timescales beyond a decade. DMS, AAS, NJD, LH and RE were supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra and by the European Commission Horizon 2020 EUCP project (GA 776613). FJDR, LPC, SW and RB also acknowledge the support from the EUCP project (GA 776613) and from the Ministerio de Econom´ıa y Competitividad (MINECO) as part of the CLINSA project (Grant No. CGL2017-85791-R). SW received funding from the innovation programme under the Marie Sk´lodowska-Curie grant agreement H2020-MSCA-COFUND-2016-754433 and PO from the Ramon y Cajal senior tenure programme of MINECO. The EC-Earth simulations were performed on Marenostrum 4 (hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain) using Auto-Submit through computing hours provided by PRACE.WAM, HP, KMand KP were supported by the German FederalMinistry for Education and Research (BMBF) project MiKlip (grant 01LP1519A). NK, IB, FC and YW were supported by the Norwegian Research Council projects SFE (grant 270733) the Nordic Center of excellent ARCPATH (grant 76654) and the Trond Mohn Foundation, under the project number : BFS2018TMT01 and received grants for computer time from the Norwegian Program for supercomputing (NOTUR2, NN9039K) and storage grants (NORSTORE, NS9039K). JM, LFB and DS are supported by Blue-Action (European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Grant Number: 727852) and EUCP (European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 776613) projects. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a major facility sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. NCAR contribution was partially supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office under Climate Variability and Predictability Program Grant NA13OAR4310138 and by the US NSF Collaborative Research EaSM2 Grant OCE-1243015.

© Copyright 2022 American Meteorological Society (AMS). For permission to reuse any portion of this Work, please contact permissions@ametsoc.org. Any use of material in this Work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 U.S. Code § 107) or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC § 108) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a website or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. All AMS journals and monograph publications are registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (https://www.copyright.com). Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy statement, available on the AMS website (https://www.ametsoc.org/PUBSCopyrightPolicy). Decadal climate predictions are a relatively new source of climate information for inter-annual to decadal time scales, which is of increasing interest for users. Forecast quality assessment is essential to identify windows of opportunity (e.g., variables, regions, and forecast periods) with skill that can be used to develop climate services to inform users in several sectors and define benchmarks for improvements in forecast systems. This work evaluates the quality of multi-model forecasts of near-surface air temperature, precipitation, Atlantic multi-decadal variability index (AMV) and global near-surface air temperature anomalies (GSAT) generated from all the available retrospective decadal predictions contributing to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). The predictions generally show high skill in predicting temperature, AMV, and GSAT, while the skill is more limited for precipitation. Different approaches for generating a multi-model forecast are compared, finding small differences between them. The multi-model ensemble is also compared to the individual forecast systems. The best system usually provides the highest skill. However, the multi-model ensemble is a reasonable choice for not having to select the best system for each particular variable, forecast period and region. Furthermore, the decadal predictions are compared to the historical simulations to estimate the impact of initialization. An added value is found for several ocean and land regions for temperature, AMV, and GSAT, while it is more reduced for precipitation. Moreover, the full ensemble is compared to a sub-ensemble to measure the impact of the ensemble size. Finally, the implications of these results in a climate services context, which requires predictions issued in near real-time, are discussed. This study has been performed in the framework of the C3S_34c contract (ECMWF/ COPERNICUS/2019/C3S_34c_DWD) of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) operated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the European Commission H2020 EUCP project (Grant 776613). CDT thanks the funding by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (FPI PRE2019-088646). MGD is grateful for funding by the Spanish Ministry for the Economy, Industry and Competitiveness grant reference RYC-2017-22964. BSM acknowledges financial support from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship (Grant 713673) and from a fellowship of La Caixa Foundation (ID 100010434).

El artículo pertenece al número especial: Applications of Information Theory in the Geosciences The Hilbert transform is a well-known tool of time series analysis that has been widely used to investigate oscillatory signals that resemble a noisy periodic oscillation, because it allows instantaneous phase and frequency to be estimated, which in turn uncovers interesting properties of the underlying process that generates the signal. Here we use this tool to analyze atmospheric data: we consider daily-averaged Surface Air Temperature (SAT) time series recorded over a regular grid of locations covering the Earth’s surface. From each SAT time series, we calculate the instantaneous frequency time series by considering the Hilbert analytic signal. The properties of the obtained frequency data set are investigated by plotting the map of the average frequency and the map of the standard deviation of the frequency fluctuations. The average frequency map reveals well-defined large-scale structures: in the extra-tropics, the average frequency in general corresponds to the expected one-year period of solar forcing, while in the tropics, a different behaviour is found, with particular regions having a faster average frequency. In the standard deviation map, large-scale structures are also found, which tend to be located over regions of strong annual precipitation. Our results demonstrate that Hilbert analysis of SAT time-series uncovers meaningful information, and is therefore a promising tool for the study of other climatological variables.