Principal Investigator
Project Description
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at the Earth Institute proposes a one-year project to create the Next Generation of Seasonal Climate Forecasts (NextGen) for Chile. The Earth Institute will work with the Columbia Global Center in Santiago de Chile and local partners like the Dirección Meteorológica de Chile (DMC, Chilean National Met Service), Universidad de Chile, and a network of local experts, to help co-design, co-develop and implement the NextGen at the DMC.
The NextGen is a new multi-model, statistically calibrated forecast system at seasonal timescales for key variables for the agriculture and food security sectors that can be also used by other sectors of interest for decision-makers in Chile, like energy, water management, disasters and health. It has been successfully implemented in Guatemala and Colombia via the Columbia World Project “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow”, or ACToday, and it takes advantage of the expertise of forecasters and local scientists at the country’s national meteorological service and universities, to maximize predictive skill and tailoring of the climate services generated by the process.
With the implementation of the NextGen in Chile, the Columbia Global Center in Santiago will be helping institutions like DMC to address an important demand present in multiple sectors in the country: the provision of skillful and tailored seasonal forecasts as a basis to support and enhance a wide variety of climate services in the country. The project will bring together in Santiago experts from IRI/Columbia University, DMC and Universidad de Chile to train a new generation of forecasters in this country, and as an ultimate outcome will implement and operationalize the NextGen at DMC, setting the stage with long-term institutional partners to guarantee the embedding of new climate services in Chile’s decision-making frameworks.