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Science 14 October 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5746, pp. 248 - 249
DOI: 10.1126/science.1115255
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Perspectives

ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE:
Weather Forecasting with Ensemble Methods

Tilmann Gneiting and Adrian E. Raftery

Traditional weather forecasting has been built on a foundation of deterministic modeling--start with initial conditions, put them into a supercomputer model, and end up with a prediction about future weather. But as Gneiting and Raftery discuss in their Perspective, a new approach--ensemble forecasting--was introduced in the early 1990s. In this method, up to 100 different computer runs, each with slightly different starting conditions or model assumptions, are combined into a weather forecast. In concert with statistical techniques, ensembles can provide accurate statements about the uncertainty in daily and seasonal forecasting. The challenge now is to improve the modeling, statistical analysis, and visualization technologies for disseminating the ensemble results.

The authors are in the Department of Statistics, University of Washington, Box 354322, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. E-mail: tilmann{at}stat.washington.edu

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