Title
Strength outlooks for the El Niño-Southern Oscillation
Date Issued
01 February 2019
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
L'Heureux M.
Tippett M.
Barnston A.
Becker E.
Bell G.
Di Liberto T.
Gottschalck J.
Halpert M.
Hu Z.
Johnson N.
Xue Y.
Wang W.
Publisher(s)
American Meteorological Society
Abstract
Three strategies for creating probabilistic forecast outlooks for El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) are compared. One is subjective and is currently used by the NOAA/Climate Prediction Center (CPC) to produce official ENSO outlooks. A second is purely objective and is based on the North American Multimodel Ensemble (NMME).Anew third strategy is proposed in which the forecaster only provides the expected value of the Niño-3.4 index, and then categorical probabilities are objectively determined based on past skill. The new strategy results in more confident probabilities compared to the subjective approach and higher verification scores, while avoiding the significant forecast busts that sometimes afflict the NMME-based objective approach. The higher verification scores of the new strategy appear to result from the added value that forecasters provide in predicting the mean, combined with more reliable representations of uncertainty, which is difficult to represent because forecasters often assume less confidence than is justified. Moreover, the new approach can produce higher-resolution probabilistic forecasts that include ENSO strength information and that are difficult, if not impossible, for forecasters to produce. To illustrate, a nine-category ENSO outlook based on the new strategy is assessed and found to be skillful. The new approach can be applied to other outlooks where users desire higher-resolution probabilistic forecasts, including the extremes.
Start page
165
End page
175
Volume
34
Issue
1
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Investigación climática Meteorología y ciencias atmosféricas
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85063568937
Source
Weather and Forecasting
ISSN of the container
08828156
Sponsor(s)
ML, EB, TD, and NJ are grateful for support from the NOAA Climate Programs Office (CPO)/Climate.gov for the ENSO Blog. KT is thankful for the support of UCAR's Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) and the NOAA/National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Short-term Research Collaboration Program.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus