Climate Model Primer

Climate and weather are often confused and conflated.

Weather: hour by hour, day to day, week to week, Earth experiences weather. People are framed by how weather forecasts are carried out and communicated. Computerized weather forecast models are seeded with an incomplete observed image of Earth, and develop amnesia over future time as chaos takes its toll. Weather forecast skill drops off rapidly and is worse than a coin flip after ten days. By twenty days weather forecast skill approaches zero. Weather models require frequent reseeding, refreshing and tweaking, but the effects of amnesia and chaos always win.

Climate is the accumulation of weather over periods of one month or longer. Weather records spanning 30 years are compiled into a climate base period. The 30-year base period serves as a foundation to calculate statistical averages (normal), anomalies (above or below normal), and provides a useable frame of reference of what to normally expect. To capture the dynamical effects of Earth's climate, the 30-year base period is updated and shifted forward incrementally once a decade.

Climate expresses variability over periods of months, seasons and a year or more. Some seasons are colder or warmer than the 30-year normal which may impact business operations or sales. Some months are rainier than normal, some seem about right (near normal) or some are drier than normal. Elementary statistics are incapable of predicting this variability.

All of the world's planetary climate models have historically been funded and/or operated by governments and universities worldwide, typically research labs. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly all these operational government climate models have not been around more than ten years, and have been "tuned" to predict long-term statistical climate averages and trends on the order of decades to centuries. These government operated climate models use the flawed approach borrowed from weather models where amnesia and chaos take over. The net result has been limited skill (worse than a coin flip) climate forecasts for periods of months or longer. This poses a problem for business organizations economically sensitive to climate variability for periods coinciding with business cycles of months, quarters, seasons and a year+.

To provide businesses and organizations with new options to confidently plan and hedge climate risk, AbsoluteClimo developed G๏TCHA, its homegrown whole Earth climate prediction model. G๏TCHA predicts the variability of climate physics up to 36 60 months into the future with consistent skill. G๏TCHA computes and carries out its forecasts on multiple 4-km and 25-km arrays spanning the entire Earth at various depths from the oceans and land masses to the atmosphere. G๏TCHA's forecasts include confidence and statistical comparisons to the current 30-year base period. AbsoluteClimo has achieved this paradigm shift with a new scientific modeling method. G๏TCHA also deprecates limited skill human curated outlooks, almanacs, tea leaf readers relying on jargon, oversimplified indexes, overly complex blenders, and similar forms of entertainment.