Yaga Richter, Special Projects Lead to the NCAR Director, NCAR

Earth System Predictability Across Timescales for Climate Resilience

The escalating impacts of anthropogenic climate change underscore the critical importance of advancing our understanding of Earth system predictability. In recent decades, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events have surged, leading to profound societal consequences such as floods, droughts, heatwaves, and air-quality disruptions on shorter timescales. Simultaneously, shifts in global temperature, sea-level rise, and ecosystem changes are unfolding on longer timescales. To address these challenges, there is an urgent call for robust Earth system prediction and predictability research to provide trustworthy and actionable information for communities, governments, and organizations striving to enhance their resilience. Recognizing this imperative, the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) has launched the Earth System Predictability Across Timescales (ESPAT) initiative. This initiative is committed to fostering collaborations with the academic and broader community, seeking to address societal needs through fundamental research, and bridging across disciplines. This presentation will describe the ESPAT efforts and how the broader community can partner with NSF NCAR to address these challenges.

One focus of ESPAT is bridging critical research gaps in Earth system predictability, including subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) and seasonal-to-decadal (S2D) prediction. This talk will present recent tools and datasets designed for S2S and S2D prediction using the Community Earth System Model (CESM). In particular, it will discuss a unique suite of experiments with CESM’s subseasonal prediction system that quantify the roles of atmosphere, ocean, and land in subseasonal predictability. The results of this work challenge our current understanding of subseasonal predictability and call for more research especially in the area of land-atmosphere coupling