How can you issue a forecast so far in advance of the season (e.g., December 1, April 1) when scientists generally can issue skillful forecasts for more than one to two weeks in advance?
The issue at hand is the difference between statistical and dynamical forecasts. Dynamical forecasting, which takes initial value observations and integrates them forward in time, usually loses all skill after about 2 weeks. Statistical forecasting uses large-scale ocean/atmosphere empirical relationships to issue forecasts. Much more in-depth discussions of statistical versus dynamical forecasting are available in Section 1 here: http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2006/june2006/jun2006.
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