ABSTRACT
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future” – says a quotation attributed to Professor Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to atomic structure and quantum theory, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 Current Era. In weather and climate prediction, the accuracy of a prediction is referred to as skill. There are many measures of prediction skill, two of the most popular being the correlation coefficient and the root-mean-square error between the observation and the prediction. The correct prediction of important decadal climate variability (DCV) phenomena one year in advance can be worth approximately $80 million per year to the agricultural economy of the Missouri River Basin – a major breadbasket of the United States of America and the world; even the correct prediction of just the phase of the DCV phenomena one year in advance can realize a sizeable fraction of this monetary value.
