Experts should be able to provide reliable seasonal climate forecasts on temperatures and rainfall levels a year in advance within a decade, a senior United Nations scientist said on Monday. Further down the road, although still some way off, accurate predictions of climate conditions for up to 10 years ahead should be possible, Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research programme (WCRP) told Reuters.
"With observation technology advancing rapidly, and information about climate patterns and extremes flowing in, I am fairly confident that by the end of the decade we will be able to provide solid year-on-year forecasts," he said. The forecasts would be for overall climate conditions over a given period rather than detailed day-by-day weather.
Farmers, commodity markets and consumers as well as governments across the globe are looking to such developments in order to bring stability or at least predictability into food supplies for a rapidly growing world population. But there has been doubt among some climate specialists that such forecasting might be possible given the widely varying changes brought on by global warming. However, Asrar, an environmental physicist who served for 20 years with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and then with the US Department of Agriculture, said the signs were good.
"As we put more and more of the information that we are gathering about median climate patterns and events like El Nino and La Nina into our modelling, we are getting closer to a capability to make solid seasonal predictions," he said. Asrar, who has headed the WCRP since 2008, was speaking as the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), under which his programme operates, confirmed that the current La Nina Pacific sea cooling is likely to last well into 2011.