The Climate Watch System in WMO RA VI

The German Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) hosts the Regional Climate Centre Network of the WMO Regional Association (RA) VI Region (Europe and Middle East). One of its mandatory functions is the issuance of Climate Watch Advisories (CWA). These are early warning advisories on weather and climate events in the extended forecast range (2-4 weeks), such as heat and cold waves, heavy precipitation periods and drought, all within Europe / RA VI. The advisories are based on expert assessments of climate monitoring and extended forecast results. Users of these advisories are other National Meteorological and Hydrological services (NMHSs) in the RA VI Region. It is up to the NMHSs to turn CWAs into tailored national advisories or warnings to their end users.

One of the main criteria for issuing CWAs is the existence of any expected impact, and the advisories should also contain impact information (e.g. flooding, impact on health or agriculture). In such a large area like Europe / the RA VI Region, the impact can be very different from country to country due to the very heterogeneous climate within the Region, different infrastructure and different level of vulnerability.

To gather the impact information, an appropriate geodatabase has been established at DWD, the so-called KRONER (Knowledge Database on EuROpeaN Climate ExtRemes). Taken from various sources in the web and especially from data and reports of NMHSs, the following event information is archived as data base records: start and end time of the event, event category (flood, landslide, heat wave, etc.), related low- or high-pressure system, place (country, various administrative levels), description of the event and related impact. The data base is filled daily, and the content is checked for relevance for Climate Watch purposes by applying specific warning criteria (sufficient duration, spatial extension, extreme intensity and impact).

For the future, it is planned to transform this subjective Climate Watch system (based on expert assessment) into an objective automatized system. This new system will contain the check of warning criteria based on gridded data of preselected forecast models, the automatized generation of CWAs using text modules, automatic inclusion of impact information taken from the KRONER database, automatic visualisation of warned areas using geodata layers and automatic distribution to the users (the NMHSs).