The daily NAO indices are shown for the previous 120 days, and the ensemble forecasts of the daily NAO index at selected lead times are appended onto the time series. The indices are standardized by standard deviation of the observed monthly NAO index from 1950-2000 interpolated to the day in question. A 3-day running mean is applied to the forecast time series.

The values at the upper left and right corners of each figure indicate the mean value of the NAO index and the correlation coefficients between the observations and the forecasts, respectively.

The first panel shows the observed NAO index (black line) plus forecasted NAO indices from each of the 11 MRF ensemble members starting from the last day of the observations (red lines).

The ensemble mean forecasts of the NAO index are obtained by averaging the 11 MRF ensemble members (blue lines), and the observed NAO index (black line) is superimposed on each panel for comparison. For the forecasted indices (lower 3 panels), the yellow shading shows the ensemble mean plus and minus one standard deviation among the ensemble members, while the upper and lower red lines show the range of the forecasted indices, respectively.

• Time series of the difference between 15-day running mean values of the observation and the outlooks