Although theoretically guided projections of future states of the climate over a variety of time spans are now being tried, regularly issued forecasts by tested methods are confined to the immediately forthcoming month or season. They are often called long-range weather forecasts instead of climatic forecasts. The semantic ambiguity is a natural consequence of the fact that weather events shade into and overlap with climatic phenomenon on these time scales.
The predictibility of daily weather events fades to low levels by 5 or 6 days, but a 5-day average can be predicted with some – rather variable – skill over the range 6–10 days in advance. That product is called a medium-range forecast. Direct calculation with a dynamical model of the atmosphere underlies these short and medium-range forecasts. On the monthly or seasonal time scale, few predictions attempt to go beyond providing information about average temperature, total precipitation or other simple statistical characteristics of...
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Gilman, D.L. (1998). Climate forecasting: Monthly and seasonal. In: Encyclopedia of Hydrology and Lakes. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht . https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4497-6_42
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