Decadal-Forecasting-Project

[Music plays and the CSIRO logo and then text appears: Decadal Forecasting Project]

[Image appears of a dry Australian landscape with shifting clouds in the sky]

Dr Richard Matear: Well, Australia is a land of variability in the climate system.

[Images move through of a flooding road, a car caught in floodwaters, a thunderstorm with rolling clouds and Dr Richard Matear talking to the camera and text appears: Dr Richard Matear, Decadal Forecasting Project Leader, CSIRO]

We experience drought, we experience flood, we experience extreme weather that has huge impacts on industry and just people in general. And this effort is trying to address the ability to try to better manage that extreme events in a more effective way.

[Images move through to show Richard working on a laptop, Richard talking to the camera, Richard and another male looking at something and then a group of people looking at data on a screen]

So, we’re calling our system CAFE which stands for Climate Analysis Forecasting Ensemble System and it’s a system that basically is going to bring in a bunch of observations from the oceans and the atmosphere to kind of initialise the climate state and from that initialised climate state we’re going to kick off a bunch of different ensemble members to basically predict how the climate evolved over the Near-Term and then the third part of that effort is really to analyse how that climate system evolves and try to extract information out of our prediction.

[Image changes to show Richard talking to the camera with the sea in the background]

The key science issues that we need to tackle are really how predictable is the climate system on these sort of time scales. What is the crucial information we need to acquire to basically realise that predictability and then three to build a system that actually can extract that information from the observations and build a realistic enough climate model to deliver useful climate forecasts.

[Images move through of Richard looking and talking, Richard working on a computer and then in conversation with a female and looking at data on a screen]

This field of Near-Term climate predictions emerged as a grand challenge in the climate space and CSIRO has taken on that grand challenge of trying to use a fundamental understanding of the climate system and our previous experience in modelling climate change to tackle a new and really important for Australia which is Near-Term climate prediction.

[Image changes to show Richard talking to the camera with the sea in the background]

Climate prediction has been incredibly valuable for Australian industry and the goal this project is delivering useful climate forecasts on the multi-year, decadal time scale.

[Music plays and the CSIRO logo and text appears: CSIRO, Australia’s innovation catalyst]