The tenth IMSC, Beijing, China, 2007 - International Meetings on ...

Special AMS Session:Verification of Climate Forecasts
Diagnostic and user-focused verification of seasonal and climate forecasts: Extensions from
weather forecast verification methodologies
Speaker: Barbara G. Brown
Barbara G. Brown
NCAR, USA
bgb@ucar.edu
In recent years, the weather forecast verification community has given a lot of attention
toward development of verification approaches that provide more meaningful information
about forecast performance than can typically be obtained using traditional verification
measures (e.g., RMSE, Brier Skill Score). In part, the movement toward these new
approaches has been driven by a desire to identify and understand which aspects of a forecast
are performing well or poorly (e.g., to feed back into model improvements). In addition, this
focus has been driven by the need to provide more meaningful information regarding forecast
quality to forecast users (e.g., to aid in decision making). Both of these motivations also have
relevance in the seasonal and climate prediction community.
More specifically, new verification methods have been developed that consider attributes
of spatial forecasts that are of relevance either for a particular user or a broad spectrum of
users. While heretofore much of the effort toward development of these methods has focused
on weather forecasts, similar approaches would be equally applicable for evaluating the
performance of seasonal predictions, and for examining the abilities of global and regional
climate models to replicate current (or previous) climate conditions. Differences between
climate/seasonal forecasts and weather forecasts that must be taken into account when
applying these methods will be discussed, and examples of the types of methods available
and how they might be applied to climate forecast verification will be presented. In addition, the
concept of user-focused verification will be discussed in a more general context.
Locality and the Ranked Probability Score
Speaker: Simon Mason
Simon Mason
<strong>The</strong> <strong>International</strong> Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University
simon@iri.columbia.edu
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