Neural Network Model Forecasts of the NINO3.4 Sea Surface Temperature

contributed by Benyang Tang¹, William W. Hsieh¹ and Fredolin T. Tangang²¹Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

²Department of Marine Science, Faculty of Science & Natural Resources, National University of Malaysia,

The model we used to produce these forecasts is the same as that appearing in the September 1998 Issue of this bulletin. The reader is referred to that issue for details of our model.

Figure 1 shows the forecasts at leadtimes of 3, 6, 9, and 12-months, using data up to August 2002. Our forecasts indicate that the tropical Pacific will remain moderately warm in the second half of 2002 and return to normal in the first half of 2003.

Note that the model has not performed well in the past few months, where the forecasts have departed from the observations by 1-2 degrees Celsius.

Figure captions:

Figure 1. Forecasts by the neural networks at 3, 6, 9, and 12-month leadtimes. The solid curve shows the observed values and the circles, the predicted values.