The skill associated with warm season rainfall predictions is low, both by absolute standards and relative to predictions of cool season precipitation. Our main purpose is to report the existence of coherent warm season precipitation patterns that are continental in scale and exhibit durations well in excess of typical mesoscale convective lifecycles. We refer to the coherent rainfall patterns as "episodes" to draw a distinction between the largest and longest duration events and individual convective complexes (e.g. Laing and Fritsch, 2000). The time-space coherence of precipitation patterns is suggestive of intrinsic predictability associated with warm season rainfall. Our presentation will provide a statistical description of episodes for the warm seasons 1997-2000, as derived from continent-scale analyses of WSR-88D data. A complete description of this work is provided by Carbone et al. (2001).
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