On Wednesday, November 16, Professor Watanabe and Dr. Chikamoto of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Research Institute (AORI), University of Tokyo visited the NCEP and UMD.
They gave a seminar at NCEP in the morning on their work on decadal climate prediction using their own global air-sea coupled earth system model MIROC. Professor Watanabe provided an overview of the latest development of MIROC version 5, showing much improvement mainly due to the newly developed physics packages. Dr. Chikamoto talked about decadal ensemble prediction using MIROC, particularly with a new idea of "Anomaly Assimilation" in which the systematic differences between model climatology and observation data are considered to deal with the initial drift problem.
After enjoying conversation over lunch with NCEP folks, they visited my office in College Park and had a very nice Japanese conversation (picture).
