Abstract:Not long ago, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) published a study report about the uncertainty in weather, climate and hydrological forecasts. The report emphasizes the importance of communicating uncertainties associated with these forecasts to users in their specific applications. Otherwise, without quantifying its uncertainty, a forecast is incomplete. The publishing of a Chinese translation of this book is currently under the way. At the moment before the Chinese version is released, this paper would like to take this occasion to contribute a comprehensive review as well as some discussions to readers, which cover the following four aspects: (1) Why is uncertainty in all hydrometeorological forecasts inherited to be intrinsic? (2) What general goals should be set to successfully deal with the uncertainty in solving real world problems? (3) To accomplish these goals, what efforts have to be made and coordinated within the entire weather related enterprise including government, research community and industries or end users. (4) Finally, the efforts and roadmaps planned so far by the American Meteorological Society and NOAA in dealing with the forecast uncertainty are briefly introduced for reference. Via this paper, it is hoped that more people will pay attention to the importance of communicating the forecast uncertainty and work toward reforming and improving weather related forecasts and services to benefit the entire society.