8 May 2026

Photo: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 107, 4; 10.1175/BAMS-D-26-0009.1; figure 1

An article recently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society summarizes the key themes and outcomes of the WCRP EPESC-LEADER Joint Science Meeting held in Busan, South Korea, in July 2025. Experts from two World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) initiatives, the Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change (EPESC) and Large Ensembles for Attribution of Dynamically-driven ExtRemes (LEADER), joined the meeting to improve understanding and attribution of large-scale circulation changes and associated extremes. These issues are of particular importance as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Seventh Assessment Report will focus on the circulation response to global warming.

Leonard Borchert from FNK attended the meeting as part of the WCRP EPESC Working Group 3 on climate hazards, representing the climate hazard predictability topic. His presentation highlighted the usefulness of process understanding of large-scale climate drivers of climate hazards for improving seasonal predictions of those hazards. He showed some of the results from Meredith Avison's Master's Thesis, which demonstrated improvement of seasonal hot event predictions based on North Pacific sea surface temperature.

For further information, please read the Meeting Report.