CONFESS was actively present in the Sub-seasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Summit, which took place in Reading during the 3^rd -7^th of July 2023, to celebrate the success of 10 years of the S2S WWRP-WCRP program and look at the future.  200 people attended the meeting in person and about 50 attended the meeting online, although the meeting was not hybrid.

The activities of CONFESS are highly relevant for advancing the prediction capabilities at the sub-seasonal and seasonal time scales. Both land/vegetation processes and aerosols, which CONFESS deals with, feature as thematic topics of the S2S program. CONFESS contributed to the summit by inviting international experts on Land (Yongkang Xue, from University of California, Los Angels- UCLA) and Vegetation (Julia Green, from University of Berkley). Both gave invited keynote presentations, and took part on offline discussions and working groups.

The research within CONFESS was presented by Constantin Ardilouze (CNRM, CNRS, Meteo-France, University of Toulous), Angela Benedetti (ECMWF), Magdalena Balmaseda (ECMWF) and Retish Senan (ECMWF). Constantin Ardilouze presented CONFESS research in the land-process session on Tuesday afternoon (Predicting the Leaf Area Index in a dynamical S2S forecasting system). His presentation focused on advances with prognostic vegetation, which identified gaps and challenges ahead. Constantin also gave a poster on the flow-dependence of wintertime S2S prediction skill over Europe.  Angela Benedetti gave a poster on The impact of biomass burning emissions on seasonal prediction: a study using the ECMWF’s coupled Ensemble Prediction System the impact of biomass burning on S2S forecasts of temperature, with a collection of case studies. Magdalena Balmaseda gave an overview talk on the CONFESS project and achievements in the modelling session on Thursday afternoon, with the talk entitled Towards consistent representation of temporal variability of boundary forcings in S2S reforecasts and real-time forecasts. Retish Senan took part in a break-out group for coordinated experimentation on land processes. 

Yongkang Xue (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)) gave a presentation on Tuesday afternoon on  Progress Towards for better Understanding of the Sources of Global S2S Precipitation Prediction using Land Temperatures Anomaly over high mountains: A brief overview from the GEWEX/LS4P Initiative . Julia Green (University of Berkley) gave a presentation on  An emergent Constraint to Improve the Representation of Biosphere-Atmosphere Feedbacks in Earth System Models