The Climate Forecast System (CFS) of NCEP is a coupled ocean-atmospheric dynamical system.  Its atmospheric
component is the NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) model, with a spectral triangular truncation of 62 waves
(T62) in the horizontal and 64 sigma layers in vertical.  Its Oceanic component is the Modular Ocean Model V.3
(MOM3) of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory (GFDL), with horizontal domain extends from 74oS to 64oN,
with zonal resolution 1o, meridional resolution 1/3o between 10oS and 10oN and gradually increased to 1o
poleward of 30oS and 30oN.  There are 40 vertical layers with 27 layers in the upper 400m and the bottom depth
is around 4.5 km.

The atmospheric and oceanic components are coupled without any flux adjustment.  The two components exchange
daily averaged quantities once a day. 

CFS retrospective forecasts are conducted for the period of 1982-2004.  They consist of fifteen 9-month runs
starting from each  month of the period.  The atmospheric initial conditions are from the Reanalysis-2, and the
oceanic initial conditions are from  the NCEP Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (GODAS) (Behringer 2005). 
These runs are initiated from the three pentads  centered in the 1st, 11th and 21st of each month
respectively.  For the five runs from each pentad, their atmospheric initial  conditions are from the different
days of the pentad, while their oceanic initial conditions are the same, i.e., taken from  the pentad mean.

Parameters being assessed are T2m, precipitation and SSTs, in which, T2m is on global land, precipitation is on
global land and oceans, and SSTs are from 74oS to 64oN.

One-month lead forecasts are verified here.

Verification is performed for all of the seasons in the period of 2002-2004.

The Xie-Akin precipitation analysis, CPC T2m analysis (Fan and Huug van den Dool, 2006) and Reynolds SST
analysis are used as verification data.