This session concerns both the preparation and dissemination of standardized climate data and information for general use and customer oriented services where information is tailored to specific needs as well.
Dialogue between the climate scientist and the user is needed to ensure that analyses and presentations are relevant to the application. These should be readily accessible, easy to interpret, up-to-date, of appropriate quality and easy to integrate with other user data. Relevant metadata and quality flags should also be available. Contributions are therefore invited from both data providers and data users, to encourage this dialogue.
As a read thread, the specific role and position of the National (Hydro) Meteorological Services in providing tailored climate information and how these may be enhanced and improved will be a theme in these presentations

Major topics to be addressed are
• Climate services for the general public, media and education
• General applications and tailored services addressing sector orientated questions about (possibly changing) local or regional climatic conditions (weather extremes!) for e.g. builders, farmers or industrial producers to the development of climate scenarios for a river basin to assess future security against flooding.
• Analyses of derived variables (e.g. degree days, growing season, wind-chill, drought indices)
• Preparation of climate- and weather-related codes of practice for design and planning (e.g. urban drainage, wind loading, icing).
• Time series analysis (e,g the Delta-method versus the use of climate model output)
• Extreme statistics (e.g. extreme scenarios or extremes in probability functions of plausible scenarios)
• Methods to place noteworthy weather into context (including analysis of extreme values and of long-term trends)
• Integration with user data – presentation methods, data formats etc
• Dissemination of climate information (e.g. Internet, web-technologies, portals for climate information), communication with specific sectors (questionnaires, user boards workshops)
• International initiatives (e.g. WMO, EUMETNET, EC)
• Activities supporting capacity building (e.g. sharing databases, workshops and other forms of knowledge

In all examples we are looking for a good mixture of
• Services related to current/future climate
• Different types of users: policy- and decision makers, companies, researchers
• Different sectors: water, agriculture, health, transport, nature etc.
• Different countries
• Different regions: seas, mountains, river basins etc.
• Different scales: specific locations, urban problems and solutions, regional etc.