Sub-seasonal predictability of North American Monsoon precipitation

North American Monsoon (NAM) rainfall is a vital water resource in the United States Southwest, providing 60-80% of the region's annual precipitation. However, NAM rainfall is highly variable and water managers lack skillful guidance on summer rainfall that could help inform their management decisions and operations. Here we show that NAM season (June-October) precipitation can be forecasted by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast's model months ahead at catchment scales. This is possible by identifying the frequency of days with synoptic-scale moisture advection into the NAM region, which greatly improves predictability over directly utilizing modeled precipitation. Other forecasting systems fail to provide useful guidance due to deficiencies in their data assimilation systems and biases in representing key synoptic features of the NAM including its teleconnections.

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Author Prein, Andreas
Towler, Erin L.
Ge, Ming
Llewellyn, D.
Baker, S.
Tighi, S.
Barrett, L.
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2022-05-16T00:00:00
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-11T16:03:17.966007
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:25333
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Prein, Andreas, Towler, Erin L., Ge, Ming, Llewellyn, D., Baker, S., Tighi, S., Barrett, L.. (2022). Sub-seasonal predictability of North American Monsoon precipitation. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7kw5kr5. Accessed 31 July 2025.

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