Climate services have become the focus of major international coordination activities over the past couple of years. Most notably, in 2012 the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) was discussed at length and adopted by governments worldwide under the United Nations system. In response to the new international effort towards climate services the European Commission is investing in a number of projects to greatly improve the science, application and user-engagement needed for effective climate services on seasonal to inter-annual timescales. In particular three complementary multi-year projects, namely EUPORIAS(www.euporias.eu), SPECS http://www.specs-fp7.eu) and NACLIM (www.naclim.eu), have been funded in 2012 to build on the experienced matured within projects such as CLIM-RUN and ECLISE.

The session wants to be an occasion to present, share and discuss the results emerging from these, and other, climate-service projects . While the focus of the session will be on the interface between users and providers of climate information contributions on the scientific advancement that underpin climate-services will also be welcome.