Skillful long-lead seasonal predictions in the summertime Northern Hemisphere middle latitudes

Abstract

In contrast to boreal winter when extratropical seasonal predictions benefit greatly from ENSO-related teleconnections, our understanding of forecast skill and sources of predictability in summer is limited. Based on 40 years of hindcasts of the Canadian Seasonal to Inter-annual Prediction System version 3 (CanSIPSv3), this study shows that predictions for the Northern Hemisphere summer surface air temperature are skillful more than six months in advance in several middle latitude regions, including eastern Europe–Middle East, central Siberia–Mongolia–North China, and the western United States. These midlatitude regions of statistically significant predictive skill appear to be connected to each other through an upper tropospheric circum-global wave train. Although a large part of the forecast skill for the surface air temperature and 500 hPa geopotential height is attributable to the linear trend associated with global warming, there is significant long-lead seasonal forecast skill related to interannual variability. Two additional idealized hindcast experiments are performed to help shed light on sources of the long-lead forecast skill using one of the CanSIPSv3 models and its uncoupled version. It is found that tropical ENSO related SST anomalies contribute to the forecast skill in the western United States, while land surface conditions in winter, including snow cover and soil moisture, in the Siberian and western United States regions have a delayed or long-lasting impact on the atmosphere, which leads to summer forecast skill in these regions. This implies that improving land surface initial conditions and model representation of land surface processes is crucial for further development of a seasonal forecasting system.