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About Us
Climate Logic was established by Sergei Rodionov in 2007. Dr. Rodionov has more than 30 years of experience in climate research and forecasting (see his curriculum vitae). His career started in 1974 at the Russian Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO), where he was involved in long-term environmental forecasting for fisheries. Working at the State Oceanographic Institute (Moscow, Russia), he demonstrated the importance of using global-wide information in improving the accuracy of water level forecasts for the Caspian Sea. In the 1990s, he and Dr. J. Martin from the University of Colorado at Boulder developed the first prototype of a climatic expert system called CESNA (Rodionov and Martin, 1996), which was used for experimental climate forecasting in the North Atlantic-European region (Rodionov and Martin, 1999). Recently, Dr. Rodionov developed a new knowledge management system – ECliPS. Although ECliPS uses some ideas from CESNA, it is a completely new software tool written from scratch.
At Climate Logic, ECliPS is used as the main forecasting tool. Our main assets, however, are our data and knowledge bases. Currently, the knowledge base consists of more than 500 rules, and this number is rapidly increasing as we acquire new rules and retest the old ones used in CESNA. About two thirds of those rules have been derived from the scientific literature. In this sense, they reflect the state of knowledge about the climate system, and they evolve as this knowledge progresses. In addition, we conduct our own research, which translates into about other one third of the rules.
Our primary focus is seasonal climate forecasts, which describe what climatic conditions (mainly temperature and precipitation anomalies) are expected during the target forecast season. Forecasts are issued for five geographical regions: Equatorial Pacific (ENSO events), North Pacific, North America, North Atlantic, and Europe. For the latter four regions, forecasts are prepared in the form of maps of confidence factors (CFs), reflecting our confidence that the mean seasonal temperature (or precipitation) anomalies will be positive or negative relative to climate normals. When more information about intra-seasonal variability is available, the forecast maps may be issued for parts of the season, such as November-December and January-March periods in our winter 2008 forecast for Europe. Each forecast is accompanied by a discussion explaining how the forecast is made.
Based on our forecast maps, we also issue weather derivative forecasts for major North American and European cities listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). A verification procedure is described and skill scores for these forecasts are available. See also examples of how you can benefit from using our forecasts.
In addition to our seasonal forecasts, we provide short-term trend analyses, where we discuss general tendencies in climate conditions for the nearest 5-15 years. These projections are based on historical data, rather than climate models.
