Decadal prediction centers prepare for a major volcanic eruption

Abstract

The World Meteorological Organization’s Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction issues operational forecasts annually as guidance for regional climate centers, climate outlook forums, and national meteorological and hydrological services. The occurrence of a large volcanic eruption such as that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, however, would invalidate these forecasts and prompt producers to modify their predictions. To assist and prepare decadal prediction centers for this eventuality, the Volcanic Response activities under the World Climate Research Programme’s Atmospheric Processes and Their Role in Climate (APARC) and the Decadal Climate Prediction Project (DCPP) organized a community exercise to respond to a hypothetical large eruption occurring in April 2022. As part of this exercise, the Easy Volcanic Aerosol forcing generator was used to provide stratospheric sulfate aerosol optical properties customized to the configurations of individual decadal prediction models. Participating centers then reran forecasts for 2022–26 from their original initialization dates and, in most cases, also from just before the eruption at the beginning of April 2022, according to two candidate response protocols. This article describes various aspects of this APARC/DCPP Volcanic Response Readiness Exercise (VolRes-RE), including the hypothesized volcanic event, the modified forecasts under the two protocols from the eight contributing centers, the lessons learned during the coordination and execution of this exercise, and the recommendations to the decadal prediction community for the response to an actual eruption.