As infrastructure planners and resource managers become more aware of the looming impacts of climate change, increased attention has focused on "decadal prediction"--climate modeling that can forecast climate for the next 10-30 years. Three key variables that operate at the decadal scale are the climate commitment from existing GHG emissions, external forcing from new GHG emissions, and the climate system's internal variability. In the summer of 2008, a group of climate modelers from Japan, England, Australia, Germany, and France along with modelers from the U.S. came together at the Aspen Global Change Institute to explore modeling skill at the decadal timescale and to develop an experimental framework for decadal prediction. The framework developed at this meeting will contribute to the experimental design for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Model, phase 5 (CMIP5), which will eventually support the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).

Participants at the meeting recently published the framework developed at the Aspen meeting in the October issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society. In addition, numerous technical presentations and slideshows on the topic of decadal prediction are available on our website.

 BAMS Article on Decadal Prediction
   AGCI Presentations on Decadal Prediction

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