Symposium of Climate Variation, Prediction and Application

      A symposium themed as Climate Variation, Prediction and Application was held on November 17-19 in Nanjing, China. It was also a gathering to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the discovery of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), an air-sea coupled interannual climate mode with sustained sea surface temperature difference between the western and eastern tropical Indian Ocean. This symposium was jointly organised by the Institute for Climate Application and Research (ICAR), Nanjing University of Technology and Information, and the Application Laboratory (APL), JAMSTEC. Three sessions were embraced in this event, that is, the Climate Variability and Modelling, the 20-Year Anniversary of IOD Research, and climate prediction and application sessions. This symposium attracted more than 120 participants from 40 institutes and universities from 8 countries, including Prof. Matthew England at UNSW, Antonio Navarra at CMCC/Italy, Wenju Cai at CSIRO, Shang-Ping Xie at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Bin Wang and Tim Li at Hawaii University, and so on. There were 35 invited oral presentations and 24 posters. The symposium covered various scientific issues related to climate variation including recent observational, modelling and theoretical studies, and novel metrics. Past achievements and recent progresses were discussed and summarised.  

      Four keynote presentations were delivered on the first day of the symposium. In the first keynote on “Is Global Warming Inhibiting an Incipient Ice Age?”, Prof. George Philander at Princeton University drew a large picture of our integrated earth system in the respect of climate evolution associated with atmosphere-ocean interaction. The followed three keynotes delivered by Prof. Guoxiong Wu at IAP, Prof. Lixin Wu at China Ocean University and Prof. Toshio Yamagata at JAMSTEC, respectively, covered the topics on Asian climate variation, climate extremes in associated with novel climate mode and development of high-resolution ocean observation and modelling systems. In the session of Climate Variability and Modelling, participants summarised the recent progresses on modelling studies on a range of seasonal-to-interdecadal climate variabilities including El Niño-Southern Oscillation, monsoon, and the IOD in respect of the impacts of atmosphere-ocean interactions and model resolutions. In the 20-Year Anniversary of IOD Research session,  participants extensively discussed about the achievements happened during the past 20 years since the discovery of IOD, including a variety of canonical and novel climate models in the tropics that profoundly impact the climate variation and their mutual interactions. Based on the discussion in the first two sessions, the last session Prediction and Application focused on how to improve the model’s prediction, such that the improved prediction skills can be applied on the agriculture for the sake of societal and economic benefits.  It is believed that the developed computing technology nowadays can empower the researches on climate science. In particular, the strong positive IOD event that peaked in boreal fall of 2019 was successfully predicted out to one year ahead by means of operational dynamical models. In addition, the application of machine learning or artificial intelligence on climate prediction was highlighted in the symposium. Prof. Jing-Jia Luo, the director of ICAR, introduced their progresses on the application of deep learning on ENSO and IOD prediction, which attracted participants’ attention. Although this new metric is still controversial and debatable, it is no doubt that the involvement of artificial intelligence in climate science will shape our outstanding on climate prediction and application.