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A week of very fruitful exchanges took place from 5 to 12 May 2022. With Andréa Cachard, ENM (Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie, France) student engineer, François Bonnardot, head of the EC team at DIROI (Direction interrégionale de Météo-France pour l’océan Indien), we went to the Seychelles in order to meet our Seychelles partner, the SMA (Seychelles Meteorological Authority).

In the framework of the internship of Simon Charpigny (engineering student at ENSTA) which took place from September 2021 to February 2022 under our supervision and that of François Bonnardot (DIROI/EC), we asked ourselves how to evaluate the quality of cyclonic activity forecasts at the monthly scale. The ‘simple’ idea of comparing forecasts made in the past with what has actually been observed is a methodological challenge. A first classification of the cyclonic trajectories forecast by the 50 members of the ECMWF’s monthly ensemble forecast has been carried out. The classes obtained from the forecasts for the four weeks forecast period over the past six years were compared with the classes obtained from the cyclones actually observed.