Fund to Develop Early Warning System Technology

Caption Image: Two geographic modes of the El Nino phenomenon as revealed in an analysis of anomalies in sea surface temperature. El Nino, an anomalous warming of waters along the equator in the Pacific, is the largest of known climate teleconnections and has impacts on weather systems in many areas of the world. The analysis was done using a new image time series analysis suite currently being developed by Clark Labs. In this instance the analytical technique used combines elements of Fourier Analysis to uncover oscillations and Principal Components to determine the principal geographic patterns of these oscillations over time.

Jointly funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (http://www.moore.org/) and Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, (http://www.google.org/), the project will investigate the relationship between climate teleconnections and problematic climatic episodes that lead to crop failures, infectious disease outbreaks and ecosystem disruptions such as fire. Teleconnections refer to a linkage between climate changes over widely separated regions of the earth. The best known of these is the quasi-oscillatory El Nino/La Nina phenomenon where anomalous sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific lead to widespread climate impacts with durations that can span from months to a year or more. Other notable teleconnection events with widespread impacts include the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

The Early Warning System project will focus on the geography of teleconnection impacts, their tendency to follow prototypical patterns and the degree to which leading indicators (precursor patterns) exist that will allow a short term (3-6 month) warning of their likely impact pattern. Integration with numerical climate teleconnection forecasts will also be explored, as will the ability to serve this information publicly in an ongoing and timely manner.

Partner organisations that will assist or advise in this research effort include the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies group (GIMMS) at NASA (http://gimms.gsfc.nasa.gov/) and the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) (http://www.esri.com/).