New approaches to decadal predictions on the regional scale

The North Atlantic has a major influence on the climate of Europe. In the past, decadal prediction systems have shown consistent prediction skill in the North Atlantic for initialised models, indicating the potential to exploit this skill for better predictions on the continent. One prime area of potential for this approach is Ireland, due to its proximity to the Atlantic.

Until now, the prediction skill for the island of Ireland is limited, leading to the conclusion that dynamical models alone are not able to transfer the prediction skill from the North Atlantic to the surrounding land masses. Therefore, the project Aigéin, Aeráid, agus athrú Atlantaigh (A4) aims to establish new physical and statistical approaches to enhance the skill. This includes a better understanding on the oceanographic processes leading to the prediction skill in the North Atlantic as well as usage of statistical-dynamical predictions.

This contribution will give an overview of the approaches and a first look on the factors we anticipate to use in our analysis. Special attention will be given to the statistical approaches for the statistical dynamical prediction as well new verification procedures to evaluate them.