Poster presented at 2000 AGU Fall Meeting 1. The need for statistical forecasts Predictability of oceanic and atmospheric motions is limited by the tendency for initial errors to amplify. Thus, dynamical forecasts inevitably lose accuracy and can mislead unless accompanied by estimates of uncertainty.
Forecasts based on single realizations of initial conditions provide no such estimates.
We consider prediction of pdf moments . Here U Q 1 and U Q 2 are reversible advective fluxes T and are irreversible fluxes . L evolves as in Figure 3 . Moment forecast captures peaks and troughs in uncertainty, whereas ensemble forecasts suffer from statistical noise. H theorems in statistical fluid mechanics.