Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Lecce, Italy
Skilful climate forecasts on seasonal timescales can have large socio-economic benefits and seasonal predictions have therefore been performed operationally at centres around the world for more than 40 years. The skill of these predictions derives primarily from tropical phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), whereas predictability and forecast quality is currently still relatively limited over continental areas of the Northern Hemisphere.
This talk presents the main features of the CMCC seasonal prediction system, illustrating the operational chain and discussing the skill of the forecasts both in terms of deterministic and probabilistic metrics. The impacts of the improvements in the initialization techniques will be shown and discussed along with an outlook of the planned future developments.