Abstract
In year 2006, Räisänen and Ruokolainen proposed a resampling ensemble technique for probabilistic forecasts of near-term climate change. Here, the resulting forecasts of temperature and precipitation change from years 1971–2000 to 2011–2020 are verified. The forecasts of temperature change are found to be encouraginly reliable, with just 9% and 10% of the local annual and monthly mean changes falling outside the 5–95% forecast range. The verification statistics for temperature change represent a large improvement over the statistics for a surrogate no-forced-change forecast, and they are largely insensitive to the observational data used. The improvement for precipitation changes is much smaller, to a large extent due to the much lower signal-to-noise ratio of precipitation than temperature changes. In addition, uncertainty in observations is a major complication in verification of precipitation changes. For the main source of precipitation data chosen in the study, 20% and 15% of the local annual and monthly mean precipitation changes fall outside the 5–95% forecast range.
Highlights
The typical accuracy of weather forecasts is easy to assess using verification data collected from past forecasts (Nurmi 2003; Jolliffe and Stephenson 2011)
Just as for temperature, the changes inferred from the local station observations fall in most cases well within the forecast distribution, the 19% decrease in March is at the 5th percentile and the 40% increase in June at the 97th percentile of the forecast
There are two important differences between the two variables: 1. The signal-to-noise ratio is lower for precipitation than temperature changes
Summary
The typical accuracy of weather forecasts is easy to assess using verification data collected from past forecasts (Nurmi 2003; Jolliffe and Stephenson 2011). More research is needed on how well models have been able to predict recently observed local-to-regional climate changes To this end, this study verifies the grid box scale climate change forecasts of Räisänen and Ruokolainen (2006, hereafter RR06) for changes in annual and monthly mean temperature and precipitation from the years 1971–2000 to 2011–2020. This study verifies the grid box scale climate change forecasts of Räisänen and Ruokolainen (2006, hereafter RR06) for changes in annual and monthly mean temperature and precipitation from the years 1971–2000 to 2011–2020 These forecasts were formulated in probabilistic terms, considering the uncertainties associated with both climate model response to anthropogenic forcing and internal climate variability.
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