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Test of a decadal climate forecast

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 243–244 (2013)Cite this article

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To the Editor

Early climate forecasts1 are often claimed to have overestimated recent warming. However, their evaluation is challenging for two reasons. First, only a small number of independent forecasts have been made. And second, an independent test of a forecast of the decadal response to external climate forcing requires observations taken over at least one and a half decades from the last observations used to make the forecast, because internally generated climate fluctuations can persist for several years. Here we assess one of the first probabilistic climate forecasts with a full uncertainty assessment2 that was based on climate models and data up to 1996. Using observations of global temperature over the ensuing 16 years, we find that the original forecast is performing significantly better than a hypothetical alternative based on the assumption that decade-to-decade temperature fluctuations consist of a random walk, that is, a sequence of random fluctuations with no externally driven warming trend. The original climate forecast2 also outperforms a very simple interpretation of the climate models used for the latest Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), supporting the conclusions of previous assessments that the spread of such an ensemble is not, on its own, an adequate measure of forecast uncertainty3.

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Figure 1: Evaluation of decadal climate forecasts (updated from Fig. 3 of ref. 2).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Joint DECC and Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). P.A.S. and M.R.A. were also supported by the US Department of Energy through the International Detection and Attribution Group (IDAG) and M.R.A. received support from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) End-to-end Quantification of Uncertainty for Impacts Prediction (EQUIP) project. We thank the climate modelling groups contributing to the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) CMIP5 project for producing and making available their model output, and G. Jones for providing data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. and Department of Physics, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK

    Myles R. Allen

  2. Met Office, Fitzroy Road, Exeter, EX1 3PB, UK

    John F. B. Mitchell & Peter A. Stott

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  1. Myles R. Allen
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  2. John F. B. Mitchell
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  3. Peter A. Stott
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Correspondence to Myles R. Allen.

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Allen, M., Mitchell, J. & Stott, P. Test of a decadal climate forecast. Nature Geosci 6, 243–244 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1788

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