Larger view of image “The authors of this article are involved in many different scientific  fields, from climate modeling and analysis to crop yield modeling and  human health management in tropical areas.”

The DEMETER experiment for end-to-end seasonal climate forecasting offers, for the first time, a clear example of the benefits of both using multi-model ensembles for climate probabilistic prediction and applying reliable climate knowledge from those predictions into end-user systems sensitive to climate variations, such as tropical disease incidence and crop yield. The paper successfully illustrates both ideas and makes their implications very clear.

The end-to-end methodology applied to reliable and skillful climate forecasts such as those obtained with the DEMETER multi-model has become a successful example of the benefits of cross-disciplinary research with obvious positive socio-economic impact in the human health and crop yield management fields. The methodology developed lays the foundations of research on probabilistic climate predictions with time scales from months to decades and beyond as currently developed in Europe.

There is an increasing demand for climate predictions at different time scales. Examples of this are monthly forecasts for emergency plans to reduce the impact of warm or cold spells, seasonal forecasts to cope with the remote effects caused by El Nino or La Nina events, interannual forecasts as a contribution for the management of tropical health or food crisis and multi-decadal predictions to design plans to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The paper describes a methodology to create skillful forecasts of seasonal climate and climate-related variables using the leading climate models in Europe and transferring this climate information to a series of impact models for predictions of crop yield and malaria incidence.

  How did you become involved in this research?

The authors of this article are involved in many different scientific fields, from climate modelling and analysis to crop yield modelling and human health management in tropical areas. We have all worked closely together in the framework of the EU-funded DEMETER project. This project officially ended in September 2003, but the data and results generated are being used by a steadily increasing section of the scientific community.