There is a new perspective of a continuum of prediction problems, with a blurring of the distinction between short-term predictions and long-term climate projections. At the heart of this new perspective is the realization that all climate system predictions, regardless of time scale, share common processes and mechanisms; moreover, interactions across time and space scales are fundamental to the climate system itself. Further, just as seasonal-to-interannual predictions start from an estimate of the state of the climate system, there is a growing realization that decadal and longer-term climate predictions could be initialized with estimates of the current observed state of the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, and land surface. Even though the prediction problem itself is seamless, the best practical approach to it may be described as unified: models aimed at different time scales and phenomena may have large commonality but place emphasis on different aspects of the system. The potential benefits of this commonality are significant and include improved predictions on all time scales and stronger collaboration and shared knowledge, infrastructure, and technical capabilities among those in the weather and climate prediction communities.
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California
NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, Florida, and Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Calverton, Maryland
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.