CMCC FOUNDATION – EURO-MEDITERRANEAN CENTER ON CLIMATE CHANGE
A team of scientists, led by UK Met Office, has achieved a scientific breakthrough allowing the longer-term prediction of North Atlantic pressure patterns, the key driving force behind winter weather in Europe and eastern North America. CMCC scientists Panos Athanasiadis, Alessio Bellucci, Dario Nicolì and Paolo Ruggieri from CSP – Climate Simulation and Prediction Division were also involved in this study.
Published in Nature, the study analysed six decades of climate model data and suggests decadal variations in North Atlantic atmospheric pressure patterns (known as the North Atlantic Oscillation) are highly predictable, enabling advanced warning of whether winters in the coming decade are likely to be stormy, warm and wet or calm, cold and dry.
However, the study revealed that this predictable signal is much smaller than it should be in current climate models. Hence 100 times more ensemble members are required to extract it, and additional steps are needed to balance the effects of winds and greenhouse gases. The team showed that, by taking these deficiencies into account, skillful predictions of extreme European winter decades are possible.
Lead author Dr Doug Smith, who heads decadal climate prediction research and development at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “The message from this study is double-edged: climate is much more predictable than we previously thought, but there is a clear need to improve how models simulate regional changes.”
Advance warning of severe winter weather is imperative to those who make risk-based decisions over longer timescales.For example, better forecasts can help the Environment Agency plan water management and flood defences, insurance companies plan for the changing risks, the energy sector to mitigate against potential blackouts and surges, and airports plan for potential disruption.
Improving model simulations will enhance the countries’ response, resilience and security against the effects of extreme weather and climate change – influencing future policy decisions to protect people’s lives, property and infrastructure.
###
Read more:
The paper on Nature:
Smith, D.M., Scaife, A.A., Eade, R. et al. North Atlantic climate far more predictable than models imply. Nature 583, 796-800 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2525-0
Source: based on Met Office press release
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The Brits have an unfair advantage. They are the only country with Weather. Everybody else just had a climate.
So they have a long tradition of examining it…..
Can they really predict model results now?
They have a computer model to predict the answers the computer models will give.
Well, if they talk to the programmers there is a good chance they could predict the results.
they also have huge compute and the best model
Damning with faint praise.
take it up with judith curry and other forecaster who use the data to make money.
market beats markw
Making money makes one right?
A good socialist like yourself is actually taking that position?
They also have climate model data.
Who knew?
Who needs mavviely adjusted surface records and paleo treemometers when you can just have a coded computer model spit out the data from the past?
It’s like a time machine without the causality paradox.
not how it works.
But the science was settled years ago (so I was told, and who am I to doubt the experts
and the latest examination shows how warming is affecting British weather!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/31/climate-crisis-exerting-increasing-impact-on-uk-says-met-office
Sorry, no. Since the NAO is a Jet Stream/atmospheric pressure oscillation, it varies by the week, not the decade. Now, the oceanic temperature variations AMO (Atlantic Multidecedal Oscillation) is, by definition, a decadal variation, but not the NAO & jet stream.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/month_nao_index.shtml
So far about AMO
Mulidecadal even 😀
Krishna , I have been harbouring a suspicion of double peaking of the AMO from looking at various meteorological signals relevant to the N Atlantic . Your chart seems to confirm this . Dare you speculate on a mechanism ? We appear to be on the declining shoulder of the second peak of the latest positive phase of AMO . In the last century that indicated NH cooling .
I keep hoping that someone will post here, or at , say , dropbox, a definitive article on AMO. I don’t quite trust the Wiki article although I did learn that it was M E Mann who named it , although not the first to suspect its presence as a major climate influence.
Lüning Varenholt wrote about in the ““The Neglected Sun”.”
“The Neglected Sun”
As I remember well they were the first to identify the climate connection of the AMO
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/7/7/1190/5686731
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/amo_faq.php
The paper is paywalled, but the lead author, Doug Smith, has been working on NAO predictability, on a seasonal scale, since 2014. His claim is that the predictability is there, in the data, with relatively high SNR, but current ensemble models just lack the skill to find it, backing this up with data which shows “promising” correlation to seasonal trends.
So this 2020 paper is apparently the culmination of this research.
Here is his 2014 paper, which lays out the basis of this idea:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/qj.2479
“Seasonal to decadal prediction of the winter North Atlantic Oscillation: emerging capability and future prospects”, Doug M. Smith, et al.,
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/qj.2479 [pdf, 2014]
So, like the missing heat hiding deep in the oceans, the truth of the climate’s predictability is hiding deep in the data, & climate models are not good enough to find it. Send more money.
” the truth of the climate’s predictability is hiding deep in the data,”
Actually, the truth of a prediction is plain to see, but we have to wait until the predicted time to see it. We do not even need to know the details of how the predictions were made. They either got it right, or they were wrong.
Not exactly. They have to state,in advance,the limits and so variance, of the prediction.
If they confer a wide latitude to the limits, then the model is not skillful in predicting, so just another exercise.
I was addressing the truth, not the relative ease, of prediction. Increasing the variance tends to increase model skill rating, because skill is a measure of accuracy and it will be more likely to “get it right”, even if trivially.
In any case, the outcome must still fall within any specified predicted limits. So it will still be plain to see and verify.
Thank you for the comment and link Johanus. The NAO is part of the ~60-year oscillation discovered by Schlesinger & Ramakutti in 1994. As any oscillation it is inherently predictable to a certain extent for as long as it is active.
NAO is highly dependent on AO, which is highly dependent on solar activity, ENSO, and the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, through their combined effect on the polar vortex. The weather in the North Atlantic region thus depends on a chaotic element (atmospheric circulation) over which two non-chaotic elements are acting, solar activity and the QBO, both of which are predictable to a certain extent.
Smith is demonstrating skill in hindcasting the NAO. I’ll have to look how he incorporates this elements. What would be useful would be to know his forecasts.
Myself am expecting a North American and European winter similar to the 2009-2010 shown in figure 1 of the paper you link. Some of the factors are present:
-Low solar activity
-QBO turning eastward (not yet there)
What is not there is ENSO, as a La Niña is developing, so the winter might not be as harsh as the 2009-2010.
The reason Smith et al. talk only about winter predictability and not year-round predictability is because the driver of this winter predictability is the transfer of energy towards the dark winter pole from the latitudinal insolation gradient through the latitudinal temperature gradient. This transfer takes place twice a year alternating the pole and is regulated by the zonal/meridional state of the atmospheric circulation. Thus only winter can be predicted because only during the winter that transfer of energy becomes dependent on solar activity, the QBO and ENSO. That is one of the reasons the solar signature on climate is so hard to find. It acts intermittently and is amplified or damped by the atmosphere. But when you know when and where to look the signal is there in all its glory:
This image shows the pressure anomaly (geopotential height) in the lower stratosphere during winters for the combined years with high solar activity and low solar activity (the right image corresponds to next winter).
That smell isn’t ordinary bovine bowel movements. It’s EurekAlert! folks.
I thought it was the onion.
JKrob. Read and understand the paper before trying to be a clever.
“ Hence 100 times more ensemble members are required to extract it, and additional steps are needed to balance the effects of winds and greenhouse gases. ”
Or as we say in English, “send more money”.
it pays for itself in savings from re insurance
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Please demonstrate this. Just because models predict something, doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen.
Decade long predictions…? Right, as a UK resident, I can confirm our Met Office can’t get next weeks weather prediction right very often.
Hey ho, let’s be optimistic.
Having been a weather forecaster, I can tell you that computer models are garbage longer than 5-7 days. (Last January ALL the models had PDX with 0℉ or lower ten days out-it didn’t even hit freezing.) Have you seen NWS 30 day, 60 day, or 90 day outlooks? 70% chance of being colder than normal is the same as 30% chance of warmer than normal, so no matter what happens, they made their ‘forecast.’ Garbage!
“having been”
nice appeal to past crendentials
I prefer data as opposed to personal hype
https://www.ecmwf.int/en/elibrary/8450-forecast-skill-horizon
at least he had some credentials … for you to make fun of … I prefer less snark from ignorant warmists but I guess we are stuck with you …
Normally steve demands that only those with credentials be listened to.
Except when those with credentials disagree with the position that steve is paid to push.
ROD. For Heaven’s sake, give the author a break, this isn’t about predicting the exact weather in Cleethorpes on Christmas day 10 or 20 years hence. It’s about understanding how various long term factors can influence the weather. The better you understand that, the better you can make your short /medium term forecasts.
Well, what is this coming winter going to be like then?
The coming winter is only 10% of the coming decade so plenty of wiggle room.
Agreed. It is a lot of talk but I want predictions. You know that nasty requirement of the scientific method. They seem to have forgot that part or maybe it’s behind the paywall?
PS. How is the MET office vs Piers Morgan match going? Last I checked in it was 6-nil for Piers.
Flanders and Swan knew the answer:
January brings the snow
Makes your feet and fingers glow.
February’s ice and sleet
Freeze the toes right off your feet.
Welcome March with wint’ry wind
Would thou wert not so unkind.
April brings the sweet Spring showers
On and on for hours and hours.
Farmers fear unkindly May
Frost by night and hail by day.
June just rains and never stops
Thirty days and spoils the crops.
In July the sun is hot.
Is it shining? No, it’s not.
August, cold and dank and wet,
Brings more rain than any yet.
Bleak September’s mist and mud
Is enough to chill the blood.
Then October adds a gale
Wind and slush and rain and hail.
Dark November brings the fog
Should not do it to a dog.
Freezing wet December; then
Bloody January again!
Try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eT40eV7OiI
They are not predicting next winter.
they are trying to predict extreme decades.
For example: will 2025 to 2035 be extreme? o or not
“We focus on the boreal winter period (December to March),
averaged over forecast years 2 to 9 to focus on decadal timescales
rather than seasonal to annual predictability. ”
Think of it this way.
Your financial advisor may tell you to invest in bonds for a solid return 10 years
from now. he wont tell you what the value will be next tuesday.
he’s not predicting that
your doctor might tell you “hey lose weight” or you will have health problems when you get into your 60s. He’s not telling you you will croak next week from that donut.
when someone makes a claim about X, you actually have to pay attention to the claim they make.
My bet is they fall flat on their face,but best of luck.
A week ago the Met Office and their supercomputers/models said 31st July would be cool/average ~23C in London.
Now it’s expected to be the hottest day of the year so far, this morning they were predicting 36C in London.
Yes climate models are somewhat different, but the institutional shortcomings aren’t; the Met Office is highly politicized and obsessed with promoting climate change .
They have also come up with a brilliant tactic whereby they can make predictions for 5 years or whatever, then update them (pull them back into line with reality every year) so you never realise how bad they were!
exactly the way the NHC does it…..the claim they were accurate because the predicted land fall and intensity…..5 mins before
Sooo, it has been revealed that atmospheric conditions oscillate on a decade by decade standard.
* Published in Nature, the study analysed six decades of climate model data and suggests decadal variations in North Atlantic atmospheric pressure patterns (known as the North Atlantic Oscillation) are highly predictable, enabling advanced warning of whether winters IN THE COMING DECADE are likely to be stormy, warm and wet or calm, cold and dry. We’ve been fed a steady diet of YEARLY temperature numbers. Thereby make a FALSE case about global warming (or not) “trends”.
Ask the cock on the muck, listen what it carks 😀
Pity that they didn’t examine six decades of WEATHER data instead of model output.
You hit it 🙂
I was looking for someone to exactly mention this. But then again, the researchers could not be that ridiculous, so I hoped that Charles Rotter had just referenced wrongly.
It is impossible that the researchers have taken model data to base their theory on. Their base must have been the historical weather data.
The researchers may have created a good template for a decade’s forecasting, but before we let our economy rely on it, we should rather rely on extrapolation of historic data, until after a decade of testing their work.
It is great if these fellows have put some formula to forecast the next decade’s weather and this could matter in some areas as food buffers and resource planning for road maintenance, etc. But insurance companies may not benefit much from a decade’s forecast, they mostly need a wider margin for error over a longer period for way tinier areas.
Rhoda R: My thoughts, exactly. Thanks…
How the hell can they “know” it will predict the future more accurately? They’re fitting is based on hindcasting. Now MAYBE if hindcasts are better forecasts will be better, but there’s no way to know the future until it comes. As Yogi said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
These guys call themselves scientists and they can say things like this with a straight face? Sheesh!!
If it’s about climate, ever.
@Meisha
“How the hell can they “know” it will predict the future more accurately? “
If weather events were completely random, then there would be no predictability at all. But there are well-known (and not so well-known) patterns and cycles, due to orbital mechanics, polar inclination, and other historically observable physical “oscillations”, which make it plausible to generalize these cycles into sets of rules and and equations (“models”). These models make predictions of future events, with some measurable accuracy (hits and misses, etc). Some models are better than others, but they are all wrong in the sense that no model is 100% accurate all of the time. “But some are useful.” [quoting George Box]
So, to answer your question, there is really no way to predict that a model will be accurate in the future. But it is relatively easy to tell which models have performed poorly or superbly, in the past. :-]
I meant to say: “…there is really no way to guarantee that a model will be accurate in the future. “
“But it is relatively easy to tell which models have performed poorly or superbly, in the past.”
ITYM ‘model’ singular. Isn’t it INM-4?
JF
“How the hell can they “know” it will predict the future more accurately?”
They can’t know. They are blowing smoke.
Tom
“Hope springs eternal.”
if extreme weather is predictable….then it’s normal
so much for global warming
Sorry, that doesn’t follow.
I am not sure if they looked at any real data or not. It appears they were comparing to models. Since the AMO is a decade or more long, the only advantage is to know the first year, since after that, you already know that you will have several more years following that pattern.
Yes Loren, that’s what leapt out for me as well –
“climate model DATA”
Results of climate models (or any models) are numeric constructs, not DATA.
I remember Met Offs 2 predictions half a year in advance about one winter, one summer, both failed 100 %
“I remember Met Offs 2 predictions half a year in advance about one winter, one summer, both failed 100 %”
The authors say they: “will predict the future more accurately”, and you show that they missed the mark in their past predictions completely, so they don’t have far to go to be more accurate in the future than they were in the past.
So with a thousand variables to play with they were able to come up with a good fit to 60 years, not of weather events (it would be impressive is they could achieve that for a month), but only of a fit to the seasonal variations in 60 years of weather averages.
Von Neumann could have done it with six.
and it alters anything?
Will they call it a “warming hole” when it cools in the North Atlantic? and other idiotic, avoid-the-use-of-cooling terms
It may be true but the can only be confirmed with future observations. This is why the AGW models have failed because they were not able to predict the amount of warming.
It is really is hard to believe a word of this press release, or indeed the paper, when the second sentence of the paper’s Abstract reads: “Although inter-model agreement is high for large-scale temperature signals,…”.
Unless of course, they are not talking about temperature anomalies, but actual temperature, then maybe one degree difference after ten years could be called “high” agreement.
I think what they are really saying is “we teased a prediction for the NAO from our model outputs that held for ten years.” Not that they have discovered a way to actually predict the NAO.
” The team showed that, by taking these deficiencies into account, skillful predictions of extreme European winter decades are possible.”
I know the British are still under the impression that they’re in charge of the language thing, but somehow, possible still doesn’t mean likely, and skillful is an awfully long way from the same as accurate or reliable.
Well, if it’s a computer model than of COURSE it is predictable – after all someone had to write the dang code. If it were not predictable it could not be “tuned” to historical data now could it?
OMG, using model output instead of available real data…
If they look hard enough I bet they find a bunch of intermixed Sine waves in the data (<– Yes, this is sarcasm as I am betting they do not know Numerical Methods either).
” …the study analysed six decades of climate model data…” so they modeled models? GIGO
Exactly! Double trouble, or is it trouble^2?
100 times more climate model runs will NOT solve this new observational AMO problem, as asserted. 100x all wrong is Never on average ensemble right.
I have a mate living on the outskirts of Bega on the south coast of NSW and you might recall that was bushfire country last summer in Oz. Well now anyone under 98 has never experienced a wetter July (take note ‘dams are never gunna fill’ Tim Flummery and Co)-
https://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/bega-valley-farmers-rejoice-as-record-downpour-fills-dams-raises-hopes-for-la-nina/532202
So those all those big trees and understory in the mountains roundabout are going to grow like crazy again after a very thirsty/blackened time and rinse repeat at some stage in the future. It’s what Gaia does but rest assured it will be a sign of the dooming again with all the Hanrahans-
https://www.bushverse.com/said-hanrahan
From the above article: “The team showed that, by taking these deficiencies into account, skillful predictions of extreme European winter decades are possible.”
Now, where have I heard such claims before? I’ll believe it when I see it is confirmed some 20 to 30 years from now.
Until then, it currently is—and will continue to be—GIGO (garbage in, “gospel” out*).
*Tip of the hat to Willie Soon for this appropriate redefinition.
That means they can make a solid prediction of 1 bad winter in any 10 year period. It doesn’t mean they can tell exactly what year though.
Weekly NAO/AO anomalies are discretely solar driven, and are predictable at any range. Blocking must be taken into account for regional weather prediction. With a northeast Pacific warm blob, when the AO goes negative, the NAO can remain neutral or even go positive, giving mild wet stormy conditions in the UK, but deep cold in the northeast US. I had the solar forecast correct for Jan-Feb 2014 but didn’t know about the blocking then and failed on the UK forecast. Last Autumn I spotted the warm blob and correctly predicted UK floods for mid November and mid December during the predicted negative AO episodes. Feb prediction failed due to an oversight, the remaining 5 months predictions were useful.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2019-2020-cold-season-arctic-oscillation-forecast-ulric-lyons
Most of the severest winters in history have occurred at certain quadrupole Jovian alignments, notably at t-squares. No amount of decadal climate analysis can ever predict them.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/major-heat-cold-waves-driven-key-heliocentric-alignments-ulric-lyons/
I recommend that they make a whole bunch of their skillful quantitative predictions, have them publicly notarized, and archived.
I’ll check back in , inshallah, some time around 2030 and see how they did.
I also recommend that they think very carefully about what predictions they make. It would be a shame for them to waste more than a decade of their time by making predictions that are no more skillful than Kim Kardashian throwing dice. That’s how climate science was destroyed the first time around.