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Towards a seamless system: bridging the gap between weather, climate and the development community
| Abstracts for this meeting | |||
Climate prediction at weather resolving scale: challenges and achievementsProf Julia Slingo Unlike numerical weather prediction in which there has been a remorseless drive to higher and higher resolution, climate prediction in the UK has traditionally been performed at resolutions that have barely changed since its beginnings in the 1970s. But the emerging challenges of providing information at regional and local levels, necessary for deciding how to adapt to climate variability and change, often involves aspects of weather. So the need to develop climate prediction systems that can adequately resolve weather systems has become much more pressing. At the same time, there has been a growing appreciation of the multi-scale nature of the climate system, in which small spatial scale, high frequency weather can have a profound influence on the large scale, low frequency climate variability. This talk will discuss the history of climate modelling in the UK and why the move to a more seamless approach to weather and climate prediction is now badly needed. It will describe the development of the new high resolution global environment model, HiGEM, which aims to operate at weather-resolving scales in the atmosphere and eddy permitting scales in the ocean. The significant advances in simulating the climate and in understanding the high resolution coupled ocean-atmosphere system facilitated by HiGEM will be presented, along with the challenges of working at weather-resolving scales. | |||
Error reliability and accuracy in verifiable weather and climate simulationsDr Francisco Doblas-Reyes Weather and climate information is provided to a wide range of users on a regular basis. However, as important as the improvement of prediction systems that create weather and climate information is the assessment of its forecast quality. Forecast quality is a multifaceted characteristic of weather and climate predictions. Error, reliability and accuracy estimates all contribute to determine the forecast quality of a system. This talk will focus on describing the forecast reliability of probabilistic predictions in the context of the more familiar concepts of error and accuracy. A proposal of how to use reliability information across time scales in seamless systems will be illustrated. | |||
Climate predictions on decadal and multi-decadal time scales: methods. results and linksDr James Murphy Climate models simulate historical climate with considerable skill, yet they also show significant biases, and a substantial spread in their future projections on decadal to centennial time scales. Modelling centres strive continuously to improve their models, yet progress is hard-won and incremental, implying that we must live with significant uncertainties for the foreseeable future. Therefore, methods are also needed to quantifying the risk of different future outcomes, consistent with currently available knowledge. This talk describes climate projections from current models, and discusses issues involved in the estimation of relative probabilities of future outcomes. The initialisation of climate models with observations will also be discussed, illustrating improvements in predictive skill out to a couple of decades or so ahead, and prospects for the use of such information to improve the observational constraint on longer term projections. | |||
Believing the incredible: how and why cliamte information is ignored - some insights from AfricaDr Richard Washington Links between adverse weather or climate anomalies and economic set backs abound in recent decades in Africa. Examples of this link are widely acknowledged by researchers, NGOs, governments and the private sector. At the same time the continent serves as a glowing example of the industry amongst climate scientists in developing consensus climate predictions, particularly on seasonal time scales through the Climate Outlook Forums (COFs) which have now been running for more than 10 years. There is nevertheless a remarkable disconnect between the existence of climate information (which is not confined to predictions) and any real, demonstrable uptake of that information in economic planning and decision making. A number of examples of this failure are put forward and an attempt is made to understand why climate information does not feature more readily in the regional and national economies. Accurate diagnosis of the problem followed by a resolution of this disconnect would secure the proper place of climate science in the development agenda. This, however, may be a long time coming. | |||
Weather, climate and the Millennium development goalsDr Mike Harrison mikeharrison26-at-btinternet.com The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent an approach to international co-ordination of development activities in all parts of the world. While most of the MDGs are intended to complete in 2015, their achievement requires decision making and actions covering a wide range of time scales. Given that most countries working towards the MDGs are at lower latitudes where adverse weather and climate events might impose substantial and possibly long-lasting impacts on economic and social activities, both short and long term, it seems appropriate that consideration of weather and climate should be fundamental in work towards achieving the MDGs. Indeed there are numerous examples of expressed expert opinion along such lines. An examination will be presented as to the role of weather and climate in the management of the MDGs, and thoughts offered as to the genisis of the current position. | |||
Sustainable development in a climate of uncertainty: using climate and weather information to overcome povertyDr Steve Jennings stjennings-at-oxfam.org.uk Development and humanitarian organisations have used weather forecasting in a limited way for some decades, for example, as part of Early Warning Systems and for crop insurance. However, as it has become increasingly apparent that climate change will have disproportionate effects on people living in poverty, weather and climate forecasting is beginning to be used in ways that are new to the development community. This includes long-term planning, novel development ‘products’, and in advocacy. This paper assesses the constraints on achieving a more comprehensive use of forecasting information, and asks the extent to which more seamless forecasting would help overcome them. It then suggests some ways by which the development community and forecasters could help forecasting play a larger role in overcoming poverty |