Preparing for peat production seasons in Finland and experimenting with long range impact forecasting

Abstract

In Finland peat has been used for energy production, for agricultural and horticultural and environmental purposes. Success of peat production depends on weather. Dry and sunny conditions are needed, and weather forecasts give the basis for the planning the activities of relatively short production season. In 2017, by request of the leading Finnish peat production company Vapo, Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) co-designed a long-range-forecast experiment to describe the risk for rainy days in summer 2017. The experiment started in April and continued throughout the peat production season (May–August). We used the CFSv2 forecasts and FMI gridded historical data to downscale the global forecast into regional scale. Here we present an evaluation of the experiment and compare summer 2017 to the current climatic conditions. Overall, the predictions described the conditions rather well: “there will be negative impacts/major negative impacts on peat production due to the lack of consecutive dry days”. Interestingly, this time a forecast derived purely from the climatological conditions (1981–2010) would have been a better indicator of the conditions to come. Our conclusion is that current climatic statistics complemented with LRF based predictions may offer help when preparing for the variation in weather in the coming seasons.