NOAA 31st Annual Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Workshop
SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS
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Key Questions on Detection and Attribution
Overarching Challenge:
Given the public perception of climate change and an increase in extreme events (e.g. droughts, heat waves, hurricanes), how well is our science community positioned to provide critical decision support information (e.g., answer to the questions what happened, why it happened, and what is likely to happen next) needed for planners to make decisions and manage risk?
- What attribution questions are of high relevance to decision makers, e.g., in water resources planning, agriculture, energy, and policy making for sustainable development?
- What is the contribution of natural variability to the U.S. warming since 1970s?
- Can regionality and seasonality of US temperature trends be explained?
- What is the documented evidence for trends in climate extremes over the US?
- How do we explain the successes and failures of individual climate forecasts?
Key Questions on Predictability and Predictions
Overarching Challenge:
In what manner can the quality of climate predictions be improved, in particular in a fashion to permit decision makers to plan and mitigate risk?
- What is the expected skill for predictions for week-2, weeks 3 & 4, monthly, and seasonal time scales?
- Over last 10-15 years, how have modeling improvements affected predictions, their skill, and have they improved our understanding of predictability over the US?
- What are the outstanding scientific questions for SI prediction and predictability?
- What are the prospects for skillful drought prediction over the US?
- What are the predictability estimates of ENSO? How does this compare to the current skill of real-time ENSO forecasts?
- How can climate prediction products be improved for decision making?