Forecasts of surface air temperature and precipitation in North America for three monthe average conditions during January through March, 1998 produced by a hierarchy of COLA models, indicate that the coming winter will be warmer than normal for most of the continent and substantially wetter than normal along the wast coast and along the southern tier. This forecast, produced by climate models, is very similar to what has been observed during previous lare warm El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, especially the one that occurred in 1982-83. The forecast procedure involves multiple steps. First, global sea surface temperature (SST) is predicted by a combination of dynamical and statistical models. The predicted SST is used to force a global atmospheric mode. The forecast maps shown here are the actual outputs of the model. No subjective or empirical correction has been made to the numerical output of the COLA atmospheric model.
Complete copies of this report are available from:
Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies
last update: 10 September 1997
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