Development of Dynamical Seasonal Prediction System for Northern Winter using the Cryospheric Condition of Late Autumn

Abstract

In recent several years, East Asia, Europe and North America have suffered successive cold winters and a number of historical records on the extreme weathers are replaced with new record-breaking cold events. As a possible explanation, several studies suggested that cryospheric conditions of Northern Hemisphere (NH), i.e. Arctic sea-ice and snow cover over northern part of major continents, are changing significantly and now play an active role for modulating midlatitude atmospheric circulation patterns that could bring cold winters for some regions in midlatitude. In this study, a dynamical seasonal prediction system for NH winter is newly developed using the snow depth initialization technique and statistically predicted sea-ice boundary condition. Since the snow depth shows largest variability in October, entire period of October has been utilized as a training period for the land surface initialization and model land surface during the period is continuously forced by the observed daily atmospheric conditions and snow depths. A simple persistent anomaly decaying toward an averaged sea-ice condition has been used for the statistical prediction of sea-ice boundary conditions. The constructed dynamical prediction system has been tested for winter 2012/13 starting at November 1 using 16 different initial conditions and the results are discussed. Implications and a future direction for further development are also described.