Equatorial Pacific Ocean Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly ENSO Forecasts from the LDEO Climate Data Library

At present, two forecast products are available: The standard, or LDEO, forecasts (consistent with those issued in the NOAA Diagnostic Bulletin over the past several years), and a newer product, referred to as LDEO2, that utilizes a different forecast initialization scheme. In the standard initialization, FSU pseudo-stress anomalies (with some filtering and smoothing as described in Cane et al, 1986, Nature) are used to "spin up" the ocean model from 1964 until the beginning of the forecast period; the atmosphere model is similarly spun up using the simulated SSTA from the forced ocean run.

Thus initialized, the coupled model runs ahead in time with no data insertion, producing a forecast for the evolution of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system. For the standard product, SSTA fields from individual forecasts are composited by lag-averaging the results from six consecutive monthly initial conditions. The composited forecasts for lead times of 3,6,9, and 12 months are then post-processed using a singular value decomposition analysis, to remove systematic spatial pattern errors and to map the idealized model domain onto the real one.