Conference Theme & Topics
Conference Theme
High Impact Weather: Working in Partnerships to Reduce Risk.
The theme emphasises the partnership dimension of meteorological services. Developing and sharing skills, technology and infrastructure across organisations is required to achieve maximum utility from knowledge of the weather, in particular in high impact situations.
Applications of Meteorology in warning of high impact weather and other natural hazards (ECAM)
The ECAM-sessions address how to develop multi-hazard partnerships and impact-based warnings. Working in partnership to reduce risk to the public and the infrastructure requires:
- consciousness on how forecasters express advice and warnings
- knowledge of specific requirements of the customers
- impact-based verification of forecasts and warnings
- efficient and transparent communication in high impact weather situations
Each of the ECAM sessions alludes to the main theme and promotes the idea that forecasters and service providers – whether they work in the NWP, forecasting, climatology, observations etc – always need to consider the useful application of meteorology, particularly to the public. One session will specifically focus on reducing weather risk to transport.
The atmospheric system and its interactions
The ASI session programme is a platform addressing our understanding, observing and modelling capacities of atmospheric processes and the water cycle, including feedback mechanisms and integrative approaches. The ASI sessions thus mostly cover scientific activities upstream of those addressed in the NWP, ECAM and CL programmes. The ASI sessions also provide plenty of interfaces for related sciences and applications: hydrology, agrometeorology, air quality, biometeorology, etc.
Communication and education
The CE programme welcomes discussions on the provision and dissemination of meteorological and climate information to society; in particular communication and interpretation of uncertainty in risk management, seasonal prediction and climate projections are addressed.
The conference provides a platform to exchange experience on far-reaching issues such as the development of adaptation strategies, communication within and through all types of media, customer orientation, as well as the role of meteorology and atmospheric sciences in education and training and important aspects of career development.
Numerical weather prediction
The emphasis of the NWP programme is on the development and operational use of numerical models:
- Studies on efficient and robust numerical schemes in super-computing environments, modelling of processes relevant to weather forecasting, data assimilation, the use of observations, as well as probabilistic techniques.
- Operational interpretation and use of NWP outputs, including automatic interpretation algorithms and interpretation by forecasters.
NWP activities include both research and operational aspects. The operational aspects involve the forecaster and increasingly specific users.
Applied Climatology
The CL programme is a forum for exchange and sharing knowledge on the development of climate services. In line with the Global framework of Climate Services (GFCS) these services are increasingly developed in partnership and dialogue by developers, providers and users, with the aim to support society to cope with and adapt to present day and future climate extremes, in particular those with high impacts.
The programme is organised in three session groups:
- Monitoring climate and climate change;
- Understanding processes and climate change;
- Research and services for socio-economic sectors.
As the development of climate and meteorology services, in particular on early warning systems, is increasingly growing together – many interconnections with the ECAM and ASI sessions will be coordinated.
The ERA-CLIM climate reanalysis project
ERA-CLIM is an EU-funded collaborative research project aimed at producing global climate reanalyses that extend back in time to the early 20th century. The project includes substantial work on recovery and digitisation of early instrumental data, reprocessing and recalibration of satellite observations, and preparation of climate-quality model data for reanalysis. New ERA-CLIM reanalysis products include ERA-20C, an ensemble of 20th-century reanalyses based on perturbed sea-surface temperature inputs, and ERA-SAT, a new high-resolution reanalysis of the satellite era.
The ERA-CLIM Conference is the final scientific meeting for the ERA-CLIM project, which will end in 2013. It provides an occasion for the project participants to present their work to a wider audience. The sessions listed here represent the four major themes addressed by the project.