 Thank you for joining us again Janine. It's an honor to introduce you to this colloquium. We missed you on the panel discussion. Yes, apologies for the time zone communication. So Janine is the Interstate Resources Manager for the California Department of Water Resources. Janine is a civil engineer and a 30-year veteran of the Department of Water Resources. She has participated in various interstate water negotiations and managed various planning and climate change adaptation programs. She's a champion for the science needed to improve our predictions, especially on S to S timescales for water management and the applications of these scientific discoveries in societal decision making. She truly integrates decision making with scientific information. I have really enjoyed seeing her tell scientists how we should be better communicators to make our information useful for decision making. Thanks Janine. Okay Anisha, thank you very much for the invitation to speak to this group and I apologize for the confusion which was on my part about what time zone the earlier presentation was supposed to be in. So my official title is being the Interstate Resources Manager for the California Department of Water Resources. I'm also serving as a department's drought manager now, and I've been working on drought since back in the Pleistocene. And because of this being a long term exposure to drought. One of the things that has really stood out for me is the fact that we need information at longer timescales and current forecasting methodologies for precipitation can provide. So I have a very selfish interest in being a champion for better S to S forecasting, because it is so critical for drought response, because drought is all about lead time lead time lead time in terms of response actions. So what do we have now. So this is a graphic stolen from Noah. So this is their representation of the historical skill, high to key skill score of their seasonal outlooks for precipitation. I've picked the December, January, February timeframe, because this is a critical time period for us as water managers in California in California 75% of our average annual precip is November through March, and 50% is this time period here, white on this graphic means essentially no skill. So no skill other than climatology. So in other words, if you just forecasted average conditions, you'd get white. What do we immediately observe, most of the map is white. And, in fact, you know, even their areas of high skill, you know, maybe they're up to a 40 or so, and that's out of 100. Obviously, you know that's not what most people would consider a passing score an exam. So needless to say, for all practical purposes these outlooks that Noah produces are useless. I call them horoscopes. You know it's like you read a horoscope for entertainment value but you don't believe a word of it, and that pretty much summarizes their outlooks. This was really driven home in the last year of our prior five year drought from water years 2012 to 2016. This is also Noah data. And on the left hand slide side of the slide, we see the official forecast, which suggested that California would be wetter throughout the state. On the right hand side we see what actually happened, and clearly did not verify. However, there was an awful lot of hype going on in the news about the then Godzilla El Nino, as the news media like to call it, one of the strongest events, you know, in some time. And everybody somehow, you know, got this idea that El Nino means flood or means wet, which clearly did not happen. This was problematic for us as water managers for several reasons. We had just gone through four very dry years, and we were heavily messaging on conservation and the needing to the need to plan and prepare for drought. And then we have a lot of noise in the media. I can remember one science blogger type actually saying that Southern California would be so wet we would need to know as arc. And guess what Southern California was not at all wet. So this is an example of, from practical purposes, a complete failure of the existing science. You know, we are no strangers to drought in California, we've had a lot of them. We know areas that need to have more progress on drought, and we've been addressing many of those areas such as better coverage of statewide groundwater or more assistance for the small water systems who are most at risk in drought. But the one big thing we do not have is longer lead times for precipitation forecasting. And when you think of a state like California where we have a Mediterranean climate, most of our precipitation occurs in a relatively short period of time, and water management decisions don't happen overnight. There are things like laws regulations contracts and other things that tell you the time frames that you have to act. So at the beginning of a wet season, let's say in October or November. We have some discretion for making adjustments and planning and being prepared for wet or dry conditions. But by the time we get to the end of the wet season when the rainy period has stopped, you know, we are out of discretion and we're just managing what the core of engineers refers to as water on the ground. And from a drought standpoint, what we really need as a minimum is a skillful forecast in October or November for what will the water year be like. Because we have all these intervening decisions that we need to make that would be hugely influenced by the results of that knowledge. So, you know, bottom line, the science is basically worthless at present, and we have a large need for doing something with it. So we have we and I in particular have been leading a number of efforts with coalitions such as the Western States Water Council to try and push the political progress process, push Congress to first enact the Research and Forecasting Improvement Act of 2017, get NOAA to be required to do a report to Congress saying what would be needed for, you know, for getting them to improve their miserable forecasts. And then, you know, trying to get some of this implemented, and we've been working hard and trying to get congressional appropriations for them to begin the work, because frankly one of their biggest problems is this one. Their existing process relies very heavily on ENSO, but ENSO is practically speaking pretty much worthless in terms of the way they have applied it as we can see from this map. And if we simply look at the historical record in California, the only certainty that you can see in the historical record is that La Nina years, usually, but not always mean dry conditions in Southern California. And no correlation for the rest of the state of any practical significance. So, we have been collaborating with a number of folks in the research sector and interestingly enough we just had a very productive call with one of our partners at UC Irvine. Earlier this week we had asked them to do some diagnostic work with essentially nudging climate models to see if they could ascertain what happened in the model for what what, you know, for example what happened in an climate run, as opposed to what actually happened and, you know, what, what was the discrepancy. So, while, you know, looking at the observed outcome of wet or dry years shows that there was an ENSO signal. And they also showed that the modulation of that signal by factors such as activity at the MJO kind of timescale sub seasonal with a contribution from high latitude polar activity going on, really were what caused the aim of runs to completely blow it. And that was actually very useful finding for us in that it gives us something to pursue going forward. So this is something that we are still, you know, continuing to poke at and we would love to prod the research community to step up and, you know, develop more skill in this area. So this is where I wrap up and ask if we have any questions. Thank you.