A new approach to downscaling soil moisture forecasts from the seasonal ensemble prediction forecasting system of the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) is presented in this study. Soil moisture forecasts from this system are rarely used nowadays, although they could provide valuable information. Weaknesses of the model soil scheme in forecasting soil water content and t...

This study addresses seasonal predictability of South American rainfall during ENSO. The skill of empirical and coupled multi-model predictions is assessed and compared. The empirical model uses the previous season AugustSeptember-October Pacific and Atlantic sea surface temperatures as predictors for December-January-February rainfall. Coupled multi-model 1-month lead December-JanuaryFebruary ...

The standardized precipitation index (SPI) was used to quantify the classification of drought in the Guanzhong Plain, China. The autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were developed to fit and forecast the SPI series. Most of the selected ARIMA models are seasonal models (SARIMA). The forecast results show that the forecasting power of the ARIMA models increases with the incre...

Deciding whether seasonality is of a stochastic nature, and thus slowly changing over time, or deterministic and thus repeating in the same way each season can have a substantial impact on forecast accuracy. Tests for stochastic seasonality, called seasonal unit root tests, have been developed for certain common seasonal periods, like 12 (monthly data) 4 and 2, but until now have not been avail...

Timber production in New Zealand was privatized in 1987. We examine the effects of this change on the level of New Zealand sawn timber production, and changes in the seasonal pattern, using a state-space model with intervention variables. We describe the formulation and estimation of the state-space model, and show how it can be used to examine both the structural changes around the time of pri...

Arctic sea ice thickness is thought to be an important predictor of Arctic sea ice extent. However, coupled seasonal forecast systems do not generally use sea ice thickness observations in their initialization and are therefore missing a potentially important source of additional skill. To investigate how large this source is, a set of ensemble potential predictability experiments with a global...

Recently, a prototype dengue early warning system was developed to produce probabilistic forecasts of dengue risk three months ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Here, we evaluate the categorical dengue forecasts across all microregions in Brazil, using dengue cases reported in June 2014 to validate the model. We also compare the forecast model framework to a null model, based on seasonal a...

This paper provides a description and experimental comparison of different forecast combination techniques for the application of Revenue Management forecasting for Airlines. In order to benefit from the advantages of forecasts predicting seasonal demand using different forecast models on different aggregation levels and to reduce the risks of high noise terms on low level predictions and overg...