2007 Articles

Seasonal Predictability of monsoon onset over the Philippines

Moron, V.; Lucero, A.; Hilario, F.; Lyon, B.; Robertson, A.W.

This special issue of Exchanges on seasonal prediction builds on the success of the 1st WCRP Workshop on Seasonal Prediction that brought together around 180 participants from 30 countries of the seasonal prediction, climate dynamics and seasonal forecast applications community in Barcelona, Spain on 4-7 June 2007. The Workshop was a landmark in the ongoing seasonal prediction assessment being led by CLIVAR and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and nearly all of the contributions to this issue are based on presentations
made at the Workshop. In particular, the opening article gives a summary of the WCRP Position Paper on assessing the quality and value in seasonal prediction that is being prepared by the Workshop coordinators through an extensive consultation process with all the Workshop participants. The articles presented here span the comprehensive range of topics that are being currently addressed by the seasonal forecast operational, research and applications community and contribute to the assessment of the regional skill and socio- economic importance of forecasts. It is clear that increasing precipitation forecast skill is one of the major challenges facing the community, as illustrated by the front page image (Molteni et al., 2007, Exchanges, this issue) that shows the potential predictability of precipitation in different regions of the World. State-of-the-art dynamical and empirical forecast systems, the potential for improvement in skill from multi-model, combined dynamical-empirical and calibration techniques, are evaluated. The issue includes articles looking at the prediction of the onset of the monsoon and the impact of phenomena such as ENSO teleconnections and Indian Ocean SST anomalies on
seasonal forecasts from South Africa to Australia and East Asia. Innovative applications of forecasts are presented with an example demonstrating downscaling precipitation to derive river flow forecasts and another with the use of multi-model