Annual Theme

The theme for the 2013 AMS Annual Meeting is “Taking Predictions to the Next Level: Expanding Beyond Today's Weather, Water, and Climate Forecasting and Projections”. The meteorological community can take enormous pride in 1) making prediction a fundamental part of its scientific and operational/service heritage, 2) developing and applying complex numerical models that now rely on a real-time, satellite dominated global observing systems, involve the atmosphere, ocean, land and cryosphere components of the Earth System and are run on the World’s largest computers, and 3) forecasting extreme events, in some cases over a week in advance. The advancements over the past 60 years in the Meteorological and related Earth System sciences, global observing systems and computer capabilities, combined with the ability to provide decision support services through the public and private sectors, have been a crowning achievement for the entire enterprise related to weather, climate and ocean predictions. We expect that this theme will serve as a catalyst for focusing the attention of the research, and operational communities (and also those who are involved in accelerating the transition of research results into operations) on the exciting possibilities related to advancing predictive capabilities across many disciplines and applications. Furthermore, the increasing use of predictions by decision makers throughout federal, state, and local government agencies and private/commercial sectors will serve as an important component for this annual meeting of the weather and climate enterprise predictive capabilities to decision and support services.