All states ag parts 4017949/21/2023 Recently, initialized decadal climate predictions have become available as a second source of near-term climate information. The evolution of the climate system represented in such simulations is solely driven by prescribed changes in the atmospheric composition and other external forcings. These projections provide, under a plausible emission scenario of greenhouse gases, possible evolutions of the Earth's climate system for the coming decades. Until recently, the only source of near-term (from one year to a decade in the future) climate information available to users were climate projections (Taylor et al 2013, Spinoni et al 2015). Consequently, there has been a growing demand amongst stakeholders in the agricultural sector to gather, assess and tailor climate sources that can provide practical and actionable information (Bruno Soares et al 2018), in particular at the multi-annual timescale. Because the impact of severe drought is expected to increase over the upcoming decades due to anthropogenic climate change (Füssel et al 2017, Spinoni et al 2018), there is a need for effective planning and adaptive actions to reduce the impact and the amount of related losses at all timescales relevant to decision-makers. The agriculture sector has been hit particularly hard by these recurrent drought conditions: crop failure, low productivity and pasture losses have all contributed to severe economic losses during those years (Ding et al 2011). The series continued in 2006 over the Baltic states (Tammets 2007), 2007 in Aegean countries (Michaelides and Pashiardis 2008), 2011 over western parts of Europe (Kendon et al 2013) and in 2015 over most parts of the Mediterranean region as well as over Central and Eastern Europe (Ionita et al 2017). This event has also been identified as the sixth in a series of extreme summer drought that began in 2003 with heat waves across the entire European continent (Fink et al 2004). For instance, the year 2018 was characterized by one of the worst droughts recorded in Europe, particularly over the Northern part of the continent. Most of the increased skill found with initialization seems to be due to the climate forecast systems ability to improve the extended summer precipitation and potential evapotranspiration forecast, as well as their ability to adequately represent the observed effects of these climate variables on the drought indices.Įurope has experienced a series of extreme summer droughts since the beginning of the 21st century (Spinoni et al 2019). The model initialization improves the forecast skill over Central Europe, the Balkan region and Southern Scandinavia. In addition, an assessment of the added value of initialized decadal climate information with respect to standard uninitialized climate projections is presented. We obtain high skill for predicting five-year average (forecast years 1–5) SPEI across Southern Europe, while for the same forecast period SPI exhibits high and significant skill over Scandinavia and its surrounding regions. In particular, we assess the forecast quality of multi-model climate predictions in estimating two user-relevant drought indices, Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), at multi-annual timescales during European summer. This paper illustrates the potential usefulness of such predictions for building a climate service for agricultural needs. Decadal climate prediction, where climate models are initialized with the contemporaneous state of the Earth system and run for a decade into the future, represents a new source of near-term climate information to better inform decisions and policies across key climate-sensitive sectors.
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