Seasonal forecasts and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)
Introduction to seasonal forecasting
The production of seasonal forecasts, sometimes also called seasonal climate forecasts, have experienced a huge transformation in the last few decades: from a purely academic and research exercise in the early 90s to the current situation where several meteorological forecast services throughout the world conduct routine operational seasonal forecasting activities. Such activities are devoted to provide estimates of statistics of weather in the seasonal and monthly time scales, and lie in a place somewhere between conventional weather forecasts and climate predictions. In that sense, even though seasonal forecasts share some method and tools with weather forecasting they are part of a different paradigm which requires treating them in different ways. Seasonal forecasts will tell us, then, how likely is that the coming season will be wetter, drier, warmer or colder than normal.
We consider here seasonal forecasts the outputs of numerical atmospheric and coupled, weather or climate models and the derived monthly and seasonal products up to a few months ahead of their initialization date.
Seasonal forecasting within the C3S
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