Neural Network Model Forecasts of the NINO3.4 Sea Surface Temperaturecontributed by Benyang Tang¹, William W. Hsieh¹ and Fredolin T. Tangang²

¹Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada²Department of Marine Science, Faculty of Science & Natural Resources, National University of Malaysia

The model we used to produce these forecasts is the same as that appearing in the September 1998 Issue of this bulletin. The reader is referred to that issue for details of our model.

Figure 1 shows the forecasts at leadtimes of 3, 6, 9, and 12-months, using data up to November 2001. Our forecasts indicate that the tropical Pacific will be in cold conditions in the first half of 2002, and recover to near normal condition in the second half of 2002.

Figure captions:

Figure 1. Forecasts of the neural networks at 3, 6, 9, and 12-month leadtimes. The solid curve shows the observed values and the circles, the predicted values.