The physical basis for seasonalclimate prediction lies, to a great extent, in being able to forecast the slowly varying interactions between the atmosphere and the oceans.
Natural climate variability, from seasonal to multi-year scale, has produced significant effects in the Latin American countries, which suggests that climatic change projections constitute an important element for national and regional planning.
Mr McCallum admitted in a news conference in April that seasonal forecasting was still in its infancy - a cross between climate change prediction and tomorrow's weather forecast.
Climate is a system that we know to have seasonal, annual, decadal, and even thousand and ten-thousand year cycles, which we have only really observed in earnest for thirty years or so.