Objectives

“A Coming Decade — Decadal Climate Predictions for Europe” aims to significantly improve decadal-scale climate predictions for Europe and to develop climate services to support decision-making for the coming years. Coming Decade will take both the prediction system and the forecast products to the next level, and addresses two objectives:

• Advancing the decadal climate prediction system,
• Co-developing communication formats for user-relevant forecasts.

Advancing the decadal climate prediction system

For the first objective, we will upgrade the German decadal climate prediction system to the current state of the art by using ICON-XPP (ICON-Seamless) and by taking up the possibility of a higher resolution region within the global grid given by ICON, e.g. a higher resolution over Europe. We will also implement a model-consistent initialization in the atmosphere and ocean, which will technically raise the prediction system to a new level also in comparison with other international prediction systems.

Co-developing communication formats for user-relevant forecasts

For the second objective, we will develop forecast products consistently following a user’s perspective and evidence-based communication design. Our initial focus will be on anomalous climate conditions associated with extreme weather for which specific demands and user requirements have already been identified in the past years at the annual DWD user workshop. These workshops were started in MiKlip and have been extended to include information on seamless climate time scales. A second focus will be established during Coming Decade from an initial survey and discussion at the DWD workshops, supplemented by interviews and repeated online feedback from users through quick surveys with open feedback options during development, and empirical testing of the communication formats with online experiments.

Building a bridge between fundamental research and operational use

With these objectives, the project builds a bridge from fundamental research questions to directly application-oriented research. Coming Decade has been co-designed with DWD to guarantee the transfer of the results to a sustainable operational use. With its co-design of the prediction system advancement and the co-development of user-relevant products, Coming Decade can provide support to decisions that depend on the climatological development of the next few years to a few decades.