Combination of decadal predictions and climate projections in time: challenges and potential solutions

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Befort, D. J., Brunner, L., Borchert, L. F., O'Reilly, C. H., Mignot, J., Ballinger, A. P., Hegerl, G. C., Murphy, J. M., Weisheimer, A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2022
• Subjects: Greenland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/106812/; https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/106812/1/Geophysical%20Research%20Letters%20-%202022%20-%20Befort%20-%20Combination%20of%20Decadal%20Predictions%20and%20Climate%20Projections%20in%20Time%20.pdf

This study presents an approach to provide seamless climate information by concatenating decadal climate predictions and climate projections in time. Results for near-surface air temperature over 29 regions indicate that such an approach has potential to provide meaningful information but can also introduce significant inconsistencies. Inconsistencies are often most pronounced for relatively extreme quantiles of the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble distribution, whereas they are generally smaller and mostly insignificant for quantiles close to the median. The regions most affected are the North Atlantic, Greenland and Northern Europe. Two potential ways to reduce inconsistencies are discussed, including a simple calibration method and a weighting approach based on model performance. Calibration generally reduces inconsistencies but does not eliminate all of them. The impact of model weighting is minor, which is found to be linked to the small size of the decadal climate prediction ensemble, which in turn limits the applicability of that method.