ESTIMATING MONTHLY AND SEASONAL DISTRIBUTIONS OF TEMPERATURE AND PRECIPITATION USING THE NEW CPC LONG-RANGE FORECASTS

A method for transforming underlying climatological distributions for monthly and seasonal mean temperature and monthly and seasonal total p recipitation, in a manner consistent with long-range forecasts by the U.S. Climate Prediction Center, is developed. These transformations ar e summarized as simple equations into which a user may substitute a fo recast probability value and calculate the parameters of a conditional probability distribution. These distributions can then be used to eva luate probabilities associated with user-defined temperature and preci pitation outcomes. Examples are given to show the ease of use and inte rpretability.