Seasonal forecasting systems, and related systems for decadal prediction, are crucial in the development of adaptation strategies to climate change. However, despite important achievements in this area in the last 10 years, significant levels of skill are only generally found over regions strongly connected with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. With the aim of improving the skill of regional climate predictions in tropical and extratropical regions from intraseasonal to interannual time scales, a new Met Office global seasonal forecasting system (GloSea4) has been developed. This new system has been designed to be flexible and easy to upgrade so it can be fully integrated within the Met Office model development infrastructure. Overall, the analysis here shows an improvement of GloSea4 when compared to its predecessor. However, there are exceptions, such as the increased model biases that contribute to degrade the skill of Niño-3.4 SST forecasts starting in November. Global ENSO teleconnections and Madden–Julian oscillation anomalies are well represented in GloSea4. Remote forcings of the North Atlantic Oscillation by ENSO and the quasi-biennial oscillation are captured albeit the anomalies are weaker than those found in observations. Hindcast length issues and their implications for seasonal forecasting are also discussed.

a b s t r a c tThis paper considers the potential for using seasonal climate forecasts in developing an early warning system for dengue fever epidemics in Brazil. In the first instance, a generalised linear model (GLM) is used to select climate and other covariates which are both readily available and prove significant in prediction of confirmed monthly dengue cases based on data collected across the whole of Brazil for the period January 2001 to December 2008 at the microregion level (typically consisting of one large city and several smaller municipalities). The covariates explored include temperature and precipitation data on a 2:51 Â 2:51 longitude-latitude grid with time lags relevant to dengue transmission, an El Niñ o Southern Oscillation index and other relevant socio-economic and environmental variables. A negative binomial model formulation is adopted in this model selection to allow for extra-Poisson variation (overdispersion) in the observed dengue counts caused by unknown/unobserved confounding factors and possible correlations in these effects in both time and space. Subsequently, the selected global model is refined in the context of the South East region of Brazil, where dengue predominates, by reverting to a Poisson framework and explicitly modelling the overdispersion through a combination of unstructured and spatio-temporal structured random effects. The resulting spatio-temporal hierarchical model (or GLMM-generalised linear mixed model) is implemented via a Bayesian framework using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Dengue predictions are found to be enhanced both spatially and temporally when using the GLMM and the Bayesian framework allows posterior predictive distributions for dengue cases to be derived, which can be useful for developing a dengue alert system. Using this model, we conclude that seasonal climate forecasts could have potential value in helping to predict dengue incidence months in advance of an epidemic in South East Brazil.

SummaryBackground: With more than a million spectators expected to travel among 12 different cities in Brazil during the football World Cup, June 12-July 13, 2014, the risk of the mosquito-transmitted disease dengue fever is a concern. We addressed the potential for a dengue epidemic during the tournament, using a probabilistic forecast of dengue risk for the 553 microregions of Brazil, with risk level warnings for the 12 cities where matches will be played.

Previous studies have demonstrated statistically significant associations between disease and climate variations, highlighting the potential for developing climate-based epidemic early warning systems. However, limitations to such studies include failure to allow for non-climatic confounding factors, limited geographical/temporal resolution, or lack of evaluation of predictive validity. Here, we consider such issues in the context of dengue fever in South East Brazil, where dengue epidemics impact heavily on Brazilian public health services. A spatio-temporal generalised linear mixed model (GLMM) is developed, including both climate and non-climate covariates. Overdispersion and unobserved confounding factors are accounted for via a Negative Binomial formulation and inclusion of both spatial and temporal random effects. Model parameters are estimated in a Bayesian framework to allow full posterior predictive distributions for disease risk to be derived in time and space. Detailed probabilistic forecasts can then be issued for any pre-defined 'alert' thresholds, allowing probabilistic early warnings for dengue epidemics to be made. Using this approach with the criterion 'greater than a 50% chance of exceeding 300 cases per 100,000 inhabitants', successful epidemic alerts would have been issued for 81% of the 54 regions that experienced epidemic dengue incidence rates in South East Brazil, during the major 2008 epidemic. Use of seasonal climate forecasts in this model allows predictions to be made several months ahead of an impending epidemic. We argue that the general modelling framework, described here in the context of dengue in Brazil, is potentially valuable in similar applications, both outside of Brazil and for other climate-sensitive diseases.

The West African monsoon has over the years proven difficult to represent in global coupled models. The current operational seasonal forecasting system of the UK Met Office (GloSea4) has a good representation of monsoon rainfall over West Africa.