Dual-Scale Temporal Fusion Reveals Structured Predictability in Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Temperature Prediction
Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) temperature forecasts, spanning several weeks to a few months, are critically needed in agriculture practice, energy planning, and extreme-weather induced risk management, yet their reliability varies substantially across seasons and regions. Forecast skill is often attributed primarily to lead time, but this perspective does not fully explain the spatiotemporal patterns of predictability. Here we show that S2S predictability is organized across interacting temporal components, spatial heterogeneity, and large-scale pattern coherence, and that this structure can be explicitly characterized and exploited. We develop a dual-scale learning framework that separates calendar-aligned historical climate context from lead-time matched recent weather evolution, combining them through spatially adaptive fusion to enable stable temperature forecasts across the 30 to 90-day window. The learned fusion weights reveal that the balance between these two temporal scales shifts systematically with season and geography: during winter, interannual context dominates over high latitudes and complex terrain where forecast is the most difficult, while summer predictions reflect a more balanced temporal contribution across the domain. This spatially explicit reorganization of predictability, rather than simple lead-time decay, emerges as the primary determinant of forecast skill within the subseasonal window. Topology-aware structural constraints further improve spatial coherence of predicted temperature fields, stabilizing large-scale pattern organization particularly over complex terrain. These results reframe S2S predictability as a structured, multi-scale phenomenon, providing a more interpretable foundation for improving forecast systems and informing their use in practice.