White Paper One Contributor: Tony Busalacchi

Q1. How good are the forecasts today and what are the unresolved challenges in the weather/climate forecasting? (e.g., before looking 10 years ahead, look 10 years back – what has changed)

 Incremental and steady improvement continues related to advances in HPC, satellite observations, and data assimilation. We are now at the point of convective resolving and permitting NWP models. Earth system “predictive” models at present are an expansion of models of the physical climate system. In the next 10 years we will see significant advances in predictive aspects of marine and terrestrial ecosystems coupled to the physical climate system as well as nascent efforts to predict aspects of the human system.

(Managing expectations; Systems operation)

Q4. Technical improvement – accuracy & reliability vis-à-vis value & impact

This is not either/or. We will continue to see both proceeding in tandem. As we move to higher and higher resolutions at the regional and local scale we will see an increasing emphasis on the research needed for decision support especially within the context of multiple stressors of the Earth system.

Q7. Global vs. regional vs. local: how is forecasting going to be done and who will be doing what? (i.e., role of various centres)

Forecasting will continue down the seamless path of a multi-scale cascade in both time and space. With ease of access to the cloud we will see the private sector playing an ever increasing larger and larger role. With respect to forecasts for LDCs, there may well be tension between governmental regional centers and forecasts provide by the private sector as supported by development banks.

Q8. How the future operational scheme for forecasting would address resolution & scale questions? (e.g. information provision at global/regional/local scales)

This is somewhat related to Q7. What is missing is the future role/demand for observations to underpin forecasts at the higher resolutions enabled by advances in HPC. Be it mesonets, drones, other remotely piloted vehicles, the Internet of Things, crowd sourced observations, smart cars/smart roads, will all play an increasing role at higher resolutions. We will also be seeing on demand remote sensing be adaptive swarms of drones or special event satellite imagery for extreme events such as wildfire, volcanic plume dispersion, inland and coastal flooding, etc.