Advancing polar prediction capabilities on daily to seasonal time scales

The growing demand for polar predictive capacity, along with a community ready to take on the challenge through international collaboration, means that significant future advances can be expected that go well beyond the polar regions and time scales. Given the increasing interest in polar regions, it has been argued that existing prediction capacity needs to be urgently enhanced to effectively manage the risks and opportunities associated with growing human activities and to support local communities in a rapidly changing climate. It is important to point out that by moving polar prediction into the focus of the international community, much-needed progress in many areas of climate research and prediction can also be anticipated. First, there is no clear distinction between the weather and climate research community in polar regions. Second, coupled models and coupled data assimilation systems will need to be used, even for short-term predictions traditionally addressed by atmosphere-only systems. Coupled data assimilation systems will also be important for optimizing the observing system in polar regions.