Stratospheric Network for the Assessment of Predictability
What will SNAP do?
The most important and fundamental task of SNAP will be to organise and analyse a joint experiment on stratospheric predictability. In order to prepare and stimulate this experiment it will be necessary to form a strong community of scientists and institutes interested in stratospheric predictability. The UK NERC have agreed to provide funding for a SNAP project manager who will work under the direction of the project to develop the community through regular newsletters and a project website who will begin work in January 2013.
The planning of the SNAP experiment will take place at the first SNAP workshop which will be held at the University of Reading, April 24th-26th 2013. In order to facilitate good collaboration with the existing SPARC DynVar project, this workshop will follow on from the thid DynVar workshop which will be held in Reading April 22nd-24th , 2103 with a joint DynVar/SNAP discussion day on the 24th. We would encourage participants to attend both meetings. At the SNAP workshop, an experimental plan and methodology will be agreed between SNAP partners, and experiments will be carried out from mid-2013. Each modelling centre will be encouraged to run extended-range ensemble hindcasts for several different start dates (50-100) for winter/spring seasons in both hemispheres. Experiments will be arranged in a flexible way and more details can be found in the experiments tag.
During the process of completing the predictability experiments, the SNAP project manager will be available to visit partner institutes to discuss progress and to collect data and add it to an easily and publically accessible archive at theBritish Atmospheric Data Centre . A key part of the SNAP experimental design will be to ensure that a wide range of dynamically relevant parameters are output and archived by the models to allow a meaningful dynamical intercomparison of the models.
We will encourage members of the SNAP and broader stratospheric community to access this data and perform crowd-sourced analysis of stratospheric predictability in preparation for a SPARC report and peer-reviewed publication on stratospheric predictability which will be produced by SNAP. Analysis of the experiment will be discussed at a second SNAP workshop to be held in Reading in April 2015.