MiKlip II

In its first phase, MiKlip has made important research contributions and has developed an internationally competitive decadal climate prediction system. Building on these results, the overarching goal for MiKlip II is to establish and improve the decadal climate prediction system that eventually can be transferred to the German meteorological service DWD for operational use. MiKlip II is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) with about 13 Mio. € for three years of collaborative research and a fourth year focusing on the operational implementation of the prediction system. MiKlip II involves 16 national partners from universities, research institutions and federal agencies.

The project is, as it was during the first phase, organized around a synthesis module and four research modules. The synthesis module (Module D) hosts the central prediction and evaluation systems. Furthermore, Module D places increased focus during MiKlip II on making the system operational both from a technical and application point-of-view. The latter aspect is covered by two user-interaction projects: one project focuses on government agencies (lead DWD) and one focuses on the private sector (lead the Climate Service Centre Germany – GERICS).

The research modules continue to pursue questions in the four main research areas that were defined at the beginning of MiKlip: Initialisation (Module A), Processes and Modelling (Module B), Regionalization (Module C) and Evaluation (Module E), as these areas still define the most crucial open questions in the field of decadal climate prediction. Nevertheless, compared to the first phase, increased focus is given to the operational and application aspects of the system; Module C concentrates on one focus region central Europe, and module E extends its evaluation to also investigate probabilistic analyses for potential users.

During the first phase of MiKlip, three generations of the decadal prediction system were developed and analyzed. These were characterized by alternative initialization strategies and the later generations show a marked improvement in hindcast skill for surface temperature. Hindcast skill is also identified for multi-year-mean European summer temperatures, extra-tropical cyclone tracks, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, and ocean carbon uptake, among others. Regionalization maintains or slightly enhances the skill in European surface temperature inherited from the global model and also displays hindcast skill for wind-energy output. A new volcano code package permits rapid modification of the predictions in response to a future eruption.

Together, the team used the developed forecasting system for the first time in 2017 for a future forecast. The results are available on the project website: FONA MiKlip Decadal Forecast 2018-2027.

On behalf of the BMBF, the Environment and Sustainability department of the DLR Project Management Agency supervises the funding measure Urban Climate under Change technically and administratively.