As the Earth’s climate rapidly changes due to the effect of human activities, predictive climate information has become increasingly crucial to help society prepare for these changes.
Decadal climate prediction bridges the gap between seasonal forecasts and climate projections, focusing on the time-evolving climate conditions from interannual to decadal timescales.ASPECT-EC aims to produce a set of decadal climate prediction experiments with which the BSC will contribute to the Horizon Europe Project ASPECT, using the EC-Earth3 global climate model.
The experiments are designed to jointly address distinct scientific questions. Specifically, the project will (i) produce a new decadal hindcast with updated and improved initial conditions, (ii) extend its ensemble size for the first 3 forecast years to identify more robustly the predictable signals, (iii) produce 3-year hindcasts initialised in May to better investigate the predictability of El Niño Southern Oscillation, and (iv) produce novel extended initialised predictions out to the 30-year time horizon which may provide better information for user applications.
The overall objective is to improve and produce seamless climate predictions covering the next 30 years and to embed these into societally important climate change adaptation decisions over a range of sectors, spatiotemporal scales and decision makers.