Constarium
← Search

Data · dataset · 2026

Application of postprocessing to watershed-scale subseasonal climate forecasts over the contiguous United States

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

Subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) climate forecasting has become a central component of climate services aimed at improving water management.

Description

In some cases, operational S2S climate predictions are translated into inputs for follow-on analyses or models, whereas the S2S predictions on their own may provide for qualitative situational awareness. At the spatial scales of water management, however, S2S climate forecasts often suffer from systematic biases, and low skill and reliability.

This study assesses the potential to improve S2S forecast skill and salience for watershed applications through the use of postprocessing to harness skills in large-scale fields from the global climate model forecast outputs. To this end, the components-based technique-partial least squares regression (PLSR)-is used to improve the skill of biweekly temperature and precipitation forecasts from the Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2).

Read the rest (2 more)

The PLSR method forms predictor components based on a cross-validated analysis of hindcasts from CFSv2 climate and land surface fields, and the results are benchmarked against raw CFSv2 forecasts, remapped to intermediate-scale watershed areas. We find that postprocessing affords marginal to moderate gains in skill in many watersheds, raising climate forecast skill above a usability threshold over the four seasons analyzed.

In other locations, however, postprocessing fails to improve skill, particularly for extreme events, and can lead to unreliably narrow forecast ranges. This work presents evidence that the statistical postprocessing of climate forecast system outputs has potential to improve forecast skill, but that more thorough study of alternative approaches and predictors may be needed to achieve comprehensively positive outcomes.

Links

Get the data

Where it is published

Catalogue records · 1

Topics

Provenance · 1 source records, 9 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Researcha23abc44-79e0-4544-a824-11186f87a10411 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].anzsrc:group:3702enrichment · data ucar edutaxonomy-embedding@1.1.0title+keywords+description (74%)
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[method].local:method:climate-modelenrichment · data ucar edukeyword-concept-rules@1.0.0title+description (65%)
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0