The World's First Successful Prediction of the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Event (IOD)
- Alleviate Social Loss Caused by Floods and Drought -

    Frontier Research Center for Global Change (FRCGC) Climate Variations Research Program of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC; Yasuhiro Kato, President), after leading the way for the world to discover Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Event (IOD *1) in 1999 which causes global abnormal weather, is working on to clarify its generating mechanism as well as performing model experiments using the Earth Simulator toward IOD prediction since 2005.

    Research Group (Hirofumi Sakuma, Group Leader; Swadhin K. Behera, Sub Leader; Jing-Jia Luo and Sebastien Masson, Research Scientist) led by Toshio Yamagata, program director, with the use of the advanced ocean-atmosphere coupled general circulation model called SINTEX-F1, which was developed under EU-Japan collaboration, succeeded to predict IOD event of 2006 fall from the November of 2005. Through reproduction experiments of past IOD events it is understood that the IOD events are usually predictable 4 months prior to an event. But predictions much earlier have become possible now after the world's first successful prediction of the IOD by the Research Group. A part of this achievement is going to be published in the Journal of Climate of American Meteorological Society

    We will continue to help in improving climate predictions by enhancing sparse observational network in the Indian Ocean and by making further improvements in the model and model initialization processes. Such a prediction system will alleviate natural disasters all over the world by sharing our advanced predictions through climate information network.