Assessment of Near-Term Climate Prediction of DePreSys4 in East Asia

Abstract

To proactively manage climate risk, near-term climate predictions on annual to decadal time scales are of great interest to various communities. This study evaluates the near-term climate prediction skills in East Asia with DePreSys4 retrospective decadal predictions. The model is initialized every November from 1960 to 2020, consisting of 61 initializations with ten ensemble members. The prediction skill is quantitatively evaluated using the deterministic and probabilistic metrics, particularly for annual mean near-surface temperature, land precipitation, and sea level pressure. The near-term climate predictions for May similar to September and November similar to March averages over the five years are also assessed. DePreSys4 successfully predicts the annual mean and the five-year mean near-surface temperatures in East Asia, as the long-term trend sourced from external radiative forcing is well reproduced. However, land precipitation predictions are statistically significant only in very limited sporadic regions. The sea level pressure predictions also show statistically significant skills only over the ocean due to the failure of predicting a long-term trend over the land.