The Skill of Seasonal Ensemble Prediction Systems to Forecast Wintertime Windstorm Frequency over the North Atlantic and Europe

The science of seasonal predictions has advanced considerably in the last decade. Today, operational predictions are generated by several institutions, especially for variables such as (sea) surface temperatures and precipitation. In contrast, few studies have been conducted on the seasonal predictability of extreme meteorological events such as European windstorms in winter. In this study, the predictive skill of extratropical wintertime windstorms in the North Atlantic/European region is explored in sets of seasonal hindcast ensembles from the Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction (DEMETER) and the ENSEMBLE-based predictions of climate changes and their impacts (ENSEMBLES) projects.The observed temporal and spatial climatological distributions of these windstorms are reasonably well reproduced in the hindcast data. Using hindcasts starting on 1 November, significant predictive skill is found for the December–February windstorm frequency in th...