A cross the globe, people desire forecasts out to several weeks with the skill of a 5-day weather forecast. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report suggests that subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasts would, in 10 years, be used like weather forecasts are today. Research indicates that skillful S2S and seasonal to decadal (S2D) forecasts are possible beyond the predictable weather range of 14 days based on the existence of particular initial or climate conditions, but fluctuations in skill increase as the forecast range increases. As such, intermittent S2S/S2D skill can be exploited by strategically targeting windows of opportunity. The idea has analogies in weather: in some situations, winter forecasts tend to have more skill than summer forecasts. If we can identify what leads to predictable conditions with, say, forecast ensembles, we can potentially provide more useful S2S and S2D forecasts.
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Mariotti et al. (2020) studied this question.