WCRP Decadal Prediction

Reserch Programs

The UK RAPID WATCH program, the successor of RAPID, is funded by NERC to continue MOC monitoring at 26.5°N and further north at the western boundary, from 2008 until 2014. A focus added to RAPID WATCH, not present in RAPID, is the use of the MOC observations in decadal MOC and climate predictability.

The EU FP7 project THOR, aimed at understanding the stability of the THC, has a focus on the decadal predictability of the MOC/THC.

The EU FP7 project COMBINE has a work package on the ocean initialization of climate models for decadal prediction; another work package will be devoted to decadal predictions themselves. Details of the work packages are still under negotiation; the starting point are the recent papers on decadal predictability and prediction by European labs (Smith et al., 2007; Troccoli and Palmer, 2007; Keenlyside et al., 2008; Pohlmann et al., 2008).

The German Ministry for Education and Research is funding a CLIVAR-related collaborative project "The North Atlantic as Part of the Earth System: From System Comprehension to Analysis of Regional Impacts", which has as one of its foci decadal predictability.

NCAR, GFDL, and MIT are collaborating on the initialization of climate models for decadal-timescale predictability studies. A joint proposal is under review.

last updated Fri, Mar 20, 2009 by Anna Pirani