Soil moisture effects on seasonal temperature and precipitation forecast scores in Europe. Van Den Hurk, B., Doblas-Reyes, F., Balsamo, G., Koster, R., D., Seneviratne, S., I., Helio, @., & Jr, C. 2010.
Soil moisture effects on seasonal temperature and precipitation forecast scores in Europe [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
The Second Global Land Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (GLACE2) is designed to explore the improvement of forecast skill of summertime temperature and precipitation up to 8 weeks ahead by using realistic soil moisture initialization. For the European continent, we show in this study that for temperature the skill does indeed increase up to 6 weeks, but areas with (statistically signifi-cant) lower skill also exist at longer lead times. The skill improvement is smaller than shown earlier for the US, partly because of a lower potential predictability of the European climate at seasonal time scales. Selection of extreme soil moisture conditions or a subset of models with similar initial soil moisture conditions does improve the forecast skill, and sporadic positive effects are also demonstrated for precipi-tation. Using realistic initial soil moisture data increases the interannual variability of temperature compared to the control simulations in the South-Central European area at longer lead times. This leads to better temperature forecasts in a remote area in Western Europe. However, the covered range of forecast dates (1986–1995) is too short to isolate a clear physical mechanism for this remote correlation.

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