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Climate science

Decadal predictions in demand

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 231–232 (2010)Cite this article

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Decision makers are in need of decadal climate forecasts, for example, to help plan infrastructure investments. When — or whether — climate modellers will be able to deliver is not yet clear.

Creating useful climate predictions is not straightforward. The first predictions of El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with a physical model4 arrived before anyone had thought much about how to use them. It soon became evident that the forecasts were not self-explanatory and that commodity brokers were more likely to benefit than the poor farmers that climate forecasters had hoped to help. Thus began an effort that extended two decades, and is still ongoing, to bring together climate forecasters and decision makers who could make use of climate information (see for example ref. 5). Meanwhile, decision theorists have become interested in the problem of using climate predictions (represented at the workshop by H. Kunreuther, Univ. Pennsylvania, USA; D. Krantz, Columbia Univ., USA; D. Letson and B. Meyer, Univ. Miami, USA). Their research has begun to influence the way that forecast information is presented and perceived: as soon as forecasts are created, consideration of what type of forecast information is needed by decision makers should influence which variables are included in the predictions, and which period of time and which regions are considered.

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Figure 1: A blizzard in Washington DC.

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References

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  1. Mark A. Cane is at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964-8000, USA. mcane@ldeo.columbia.edu,

    Mark A. Cane

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Cane, M. Decadal predictions in demand. Nature Geosci 3, 231–232 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo823

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