The PROVOST project, (PRediction Of climate Variations On Seasonal Timescales (Contract no. ENV4-CT95-0109)) is related to POTENTIALS. PROVOST consists of two main themes:

1. Investigation of potential skill using atmospheric models and prescribed (observed) SST
2. Setup of coupled atmosphere-ocean data-assimation and model systems for climate predictions with lead times up to 1/2-1 year.

It is only the first theme which is directly related to POTENTIALS. The difference between the projects is that PROVOST takes the atmospheric models for granted and perform empirical a posteriori corrections to improve the skill in the uncoupled predictions while POTENTIALS uses the method of (dynamical) flux correction to achieve the same goal.

The PROVOST project is co-ordinated by Dr. Tim Palmer, ECMWF. Tim Palmer is an external expert for the POTENTIALS project.

As improvement of the simulations of regional climate in GCMs is part of POTENTIALS it has important relationships with the MERCURE (Modelling European Regional Climate: Understanding and Reducing Errors (Contract No. ENV4-CT97-0485)) project. It has been found in previous projects on regional climate simulations, RACCS (contract no.’s EV5V-CT92-0126 and EV5V-CT94-0505), that errors in regional climate simulations to a very high degree reflect errors in the GCMs which provide boundary conditions for the regional climate models. Since MERCURE deals with improvement of regional climate simulations in high resolution regional climate models the POTENTIALS project can provide valuable information to the MERCURE project. But the information also goes in the opposite direction since the work in MERCURE hopefully will result in improved parameterization algorithms, in particular land surface and soil parameterizations, which can be used also in the GCMs in POTENTIALS.

The MERCURE project is co-ordinated by Dr. Richard Jones, The Hadley Centre, UK. Richard Jones is an external expert for the POTENTIALS project