Seasonal Forecasting

Seasonal forecasting is a discipline focused on predicting climate variables on a time frame ranging from one month to slightly more than a year into the future. These predictions are probabilistic which means they provide information on the likelihood of occurrence of certain outcomes instead of a single yes-no deterministic prediction. The BSC has benefited from its knowledge on the climate system and seasonal climate predictions to develop climate services that assist decision-making in the wine sector, improving its resilience to weather extremes, climate variability and change. In the VISCA project, BSC undertakes research on the development and assessment of dynamical methods for the prediction of essential climate variables for the wine sector, such as temperature or precipitation, at seasonal time-scales up to 7 months ahead. The formulation of the predictions includes the implementation of techniques to statistically downscale and calibrate seasonal predictions to feed the irrigation and phenological models that will be used by the wine sector partners to adopt strategic decisions regarding their pilot production fields. These seasonal predictions will be also tailored to users’ requirements and provided in a Decision Support System platform (DSS) conceived as a tool to support users’ decision-making at different temporal scales.