Open Access

Bijyan Bulut

• There is a growing need for Near-Term Climate Prediction (NTCP) in order to develop adaptation strategies and provide better risk management to cope with the consequences of climate change. NTCP emerged to fill the gap between short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate projections. This approach aims to provide actionable information on a timescale of one to ten years by combining observed initialization conditions of the current climate state with external forcing scenarios. Since the pioneering work of Smith et al. (2007), NTCP has become an operational product through the World Meteorological Organization Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update (WMO GADCU) reports. However, scientific maturity alone does not guarantee practical impact. How this information reaches and is understood by target users is a critical and insufficiently explored question in climate science communication. Kushnir et al. (2019). Done et al. (2021) argue that scientifically reliable near-term climate predictions often fail to achieve a level of use-relevance among practitioner communities. To examine, more empirical research is needed. This exploratory study aims to examine this gap based on how practitioners understand the WMO GADCU reports and the challenges they face when working with them. Data were collected via survey after the Hackathon session, organized as part of the Green Futures project. Fourteen participants were divided into groups focusing on Zambia and Tunisia and directly interacted with two consecutive 5-year WMO reports, the 2024–2028 and 2025–2029 WMO GADCU reports. Participants interpreted global temperature and precipitation anomaly maps, compared 2024 observational data with predictions and summarized their findings on a shared whiteboard. Following this structured interaction, participants were given a 15-item questionnaire that measured their prior knowledge level, changes in understanding, perceptions of differences between reports, perceived accuracy, recall level of probabilistic information, confidence in explaining climate predictions and the practical usability of the reports. Due to the small sample size (n=14), 95% confidence intervals were calculated using the Wilson score method. The findings indicate that participants' prior familiarity with the WMO 5-year forecasts was limited and variable but that understanding improved for the majority after structured interaction. Participants generally found the reports and session useful and identified the change in the probability of exceeding 1.5°C as the most significant difference between the two editions. Most participants remembered the value of 70% for this difference from the WMO GADCU 2025–2029 report. This suggests that incremental updates between successive editions were effectively communicated. Confidence in explaining the climate forecast was higher for Australia which is more affected by ENSO dynamics and was explicitly named in the reports compared to Zambia and Tunisia. The temperature and precipitation anomaly predictions reported by participants on the whiteboard were based on the interpretation of global anomaly maps in WMO GADCU reports. They also mostly coincided with the observed regional assessments published by WMO. While all participants found the reports useful or very useful for agricultural and water planning, understanding technical terms and relating global predictions to local realities were identified as the main challenges. These findings suggest that while the WMO GADCU reports are considered scientifically reliable, they have not yet reached full relevance in use particularly in communicating incremental probabilistic updates and localizing global forecasts to specific national contexts. It is given that this is an exploratory study and the findings should be considered preliminary conducted with a small convenience sample. Still, the study provides empirical evidence regarding the comprehensibility of WMO GADCU reports by practitioners in regional context and offers actionable recommendations for improving the communication design of future WMO GADCU editions.