Maintenance and Development of the Subseasonal Prediction Project (S2S) Database and Tools in IRI Data Library

Lead PI: Dr. Andrew Robertson

Unit Affiliation: International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI)

September 2019 - August 2021
Inactive
Project Type: Research

DESCRIPTION: The work will maintain and fully develop the existing partial copy of the WWRP/WCRP Sub-seasonal to Seasonal Prediction Project (S2S) database and tools in the IRI Data Library (IRIDL) for the duration of Phase II of the S2S Prediction Project (2019–2023). This will include adding the S2S ocean data from the primary S2S archive at ECMWF, together with any extensions to it made at ECMWF such as new models. In so doing, the IRI Data Library (IRIDL) will serve as a third archiving centre for S2S data, along with ECMWF and CMA. Beyond an S2S database copy in the US, IRIDL will provide important new resources compared to those available through ECMWF and CMA, accelerating S2S research and development of S2S applications. These will include pre-computed lead-time dependent model climatologies, with large labor savings for users. A suite of online tools with a Jupyter Notebook Python interface will enable users to access the S2S database via OpenDAP without the need to download data, a significant advantage especially in bandwidth-limited environments. These Python tools will enable diverse users to easily construct weekly forecast anomalies, skill scores, and other derived variables such as weather regime indices and vertically-integrated moisture fluxes. In addition, having the S2S database archived at the same place as the SubX and NMME databases at IRI is a big advantage for researchers, enabling a direct comparison of the American models with S2S models.