當今氣候研究對社會影響最大的兩個議題為短期氣候（次季至年際或簡稱為S2S）以及人為導致氣候暖化的監測跟預報（估）。本課程著重在S2S監測跟預報研究。S2S時間尺度的變化是由包含大氣-海洋-陸地等地球系統的氣候動力過程控制。我們將以S2S氣候動力為基礎，診斷分析過去、及時、未來（預報）的氣候資料，建立學生對全球與區域氣候裏S2S變化的瞭解，進而為持續性極端天氣與S2S的預報研究奠定基礎。主要對象為碩博士班研究生，側重觀察與討論世界主要氣候中心提供的即時氣候監測資料，研讀相關文獻，了解氣候變異主模態的現象與監測分析方法。規劃約二分之一的課程內容為氣候監測分析與文獻討論，另二分之一為全球觀測和預測資料分析實作與研討。為加強對課程內容的了解，將有作業和期中進度報告，也將由學生在課程範圍內自己挑選想深入了解的研究題目在課堂討論並撰寫期末報告。

Climate predictions on weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual timescales involves many processes that operate among the atmosphere, ocean and land surface. Monitoring and analyzing the weekly to interannual climate variability is an efficient way to enhance our understanding of global and regional climate variability and the relationship with high-impact weather events.
This course is designed to be a graduate level (both MS and Ph.D) course, with emphasis on learning about how to talk about natural variability from weekly to interannual time scales, and the fundamental statistical/quantitative methods used to diagnose the natural variability. The diagnostics aims to assess the nature of climate variations on differing time scales.
The class will be a mixture of lectures, discussions, and student presentations. Half of the course is taught by interactive-oriented lectures covering the major topics that is relevant to the real-time climate monitoring and discussion. The rest of the course time will be devoted to observational and forecast data analysis and student presentations. There will be homework and midterm progress report to cover the lectures and a final oral presentation and written report on topic chosen by students.