Response to Comment on “Multiyear Prediction of Monthly Mean Atlantic Meridional Overturning

Vecchi et al. question the skill of our initialized multiyear predictions of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), arguing that our predictions do not outperform their suggested climatological reference forecast—using a single measure of skill. We show that our initialized AMOC predictions do outperform the climatological reference forecast, using both measures of hindcast performance that were presented in our original paper. InMatei et al. (1), we demonstrated multiyearpredictability of monthly mean strength ofAtlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). We established the skill of our ini-tialized AMOC predictions not only from high anomaly correlation (COR) but also from a more realistic amplitude of AMOC variations quan-tified by root-mean-square (RMS) variability.We diagnosed the skill improvement from the ini-tialization by testing hindcast simulations against a persistence forecast based on observations (2, 3) and against a forecast with the uninitial