Skillful Seasonal Forecasts of Winter Disruption to the U.K. Transport System

Abstract

The impacts of winter weather on transport networks have been highlighted by various high-profile disruptions to road, rail, and air transport in the United Kingdom during recent winters. Recent advances in the predictability of the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) at seasonal time scales, using the Met Office Global Seasonal forecasting system, version 5 (GloSea5), present a timely opportunity for assessing the long-range predictability of a variety of winter-weather impacts on transport. This study examines the relationships between the observed and forecast NAO and a variety of U.K. winter impacts on transport in the road, rail, and aviation sectors. The results of this preliminary study show statistically significant relationships between both observed and forecast NAO index and quantities such as road-accident numbers in certain weather conditions, weather-related delays to flights leaving London Heathrow Airport, and weather-related incidents on the railway network. This supports the feasibility of the onward goal of this work, which is to investigate prototype seasonal forecasts of the relative risk of occurrence of particular impacts in a given winter for the United Kingdom, at lead times of 1–3 months. In addition, subject to the availability of relevant impacts data, there is scope for further work to make similar assessments for other parts of Europe and North America where the NAO has a strong effect on winter climate.

Skill and Reliability of Seasonal Forecasts for the Chinese Energy Sector

“…This technique has been used for seasonal forecasts in the UK (e.g. Svensson et al 2015;Palin et al 2016;Clark et al 2017), and is often used already in China (e.g. Xiao et al 2012;Wang et al 2013;Peng et al 2014;Wang et al 2015;Xing et al 2016).…”

“…Scaife et al (2014) demonstrated skill in NAO forecasts from version 5 of the Met Office's Global Seasonal forecasting system, GloSea5 (MacLachlan et al 2015). This has led to the development of seasonal climate services for various sectors in the UK, including hydrology (Svensson et al 2015), transport (Palin et al 2016) and energy (Clark et al 2017). While seasonal forecasting has a long history in China, the traditional low skill from dynamical models has led to a wide literature in statistical downscaling and statistical forecasting (e.g.…”

An Intercomparison of Skill and Overconfidence/Underconfidence of the Wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation in Multimodel Seasonal Forecasts

“…GloSea5, has significant skill (correlation 0.62) for the wintertime NAO at 2-to 4-month lead times for a 20-year period (1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011). The GloSea5 forecasts have since been used for applications such as seasonal forecasts of regional UK precipitation (Baker et al, 2017), weather-related impacts on UK transport (Palin et al, 2016), Baltic Sea ice (Karpechko et al, 2015), and UK energy demand and supply (Clark et al, 2017). Athanasiadis et al (2017) showed that even higher skill (correlations of 0.85) can be obtained for the NAO using a multimodel ensemble (MME) of three seasonal forecast systems (GloSea5, NCEP-CFSv2, and CMCC) but found that the exact level of skill was sensitive to both the hindcast period and the NAO definition used.…”

Improved seasonal prediction of UK regional precipitation using atmospheric circulation

“…Palin et al . () demonstrated that the GloSea5 winter NAO forecasts can be used to provide skilful forecasts of winter impacts on UK transport. Karpechko et al .…”