How can we improve our ability to predict precipitation variability and extremes?

To answer this question, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office's (CPO's) Earth System Science and Modeling (ESSM) Division and the U.S. Department of Energy's Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division's (EESSD's) Regional & Global Model Analysis (RGMA) program area—in partnership with the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and the U.S. Climate Variability and Predictability Program (US CLIVAR)—jointly organized a community workshop in late 2020 focused on advancing understanding of precipitation predictability and exploring ways to reduce precipitation biases.

Read the NOAA-DOE Precipitation Processes and Predictability workshop report.

Featuring four main sessions, the workshop built upon the work of DOE’s 2019 Precipitation Metrics Workshop as well as NOAA's Precipitation Prediction Grand Challenge Initiative. The workshop brought together the observational and modeling research communities as well as operational centers to address the following thematic questions:

• What are the sources of predictability that have the biggest influences on precipitation at weather, subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S), and multi-decadal timescales, including extremes?
• What are the key physical processes that have the strongest imprint on the model biases and precipitation predictions and projections?
• How can we most effectively take advantage of existing observations and data (satellite and in situ) to advance process-level understanding of the key processes and predictability?
• What are the gaps and needs for targeted observations and process studies to improve understanding and model representations of those key processes?
• How do we benefit from national and international collaboration to make significant progress?

The report summarizes each of the workshop’s four sessions in the context of these thematic questions, provides interagency and agency program perspectives and synthesizes the key findings to the thematic questions of the workshop.

This is a joint announcement by CPO and EESSD. Read the NOAA announcement here.