ES3.1

Over recent years there has been a growing demand for climate education in schools and colleges. There is an aspiration that all children leave school climate literate so they can engage with the climate conversation and make informed decisions about their own opportunities and responsibilities  

In the UK there has been significant progress towards improving climate education in the last 12 months. These include a national Climate Education Action Plan and the UK Government’s climate change and sustainability strategy for education published in April 2022.

These include initiatives like the Climate Ambassadors Scheme, launched in collaboration with STEM Learning, that will allow schools and colleges access to experts in climate change.

This presentation provides an update in recent activities in the UK and encourages dialogue to share best practice from initiatives being developed elsewhere in Europe.  

How to cite: Bentley, L.: Climate in the classroom, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-720, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-720, 2022.

To analyse, assess and localize the climate change signal for climate change impact assessment including the analysis of the uncertainty is demanding task especially with respect to the amount of data necessary. Indeed, when trying to get more detailed and reliable information with uncertainty assessment for specific localized region full spread of available data might be of importance, i.e. global ensemble of GCMs simulations (for several scenarios, i.e. CMIP results) on one side, and regional downscaling simulations for some of the GCMs on the other side. It is really hard to download all the data locally, to select necessary variables you need at you region of interest and to make all the analyses you require to support your impact study. Well, there are some options for data selection on servers side, however, some tools are available today to make all the analysis remotely on the data side, i.e. directly on the HPC computers next to the data archives. This is what the initiative of EC Horizon2020 project IS-ENES3 called Analysis Platform, which is provided for free on the basis os some kind „internal“ projects, of course not funded, but allocating the resources for an applicants use.

In the contribution, we will present the potential of this new paradigm in processing and analysing data when studying results of CMIP6 and CMIP5 comparison for the region of Central Europe, together with the comparison to EuroCORDEX 0.11 simulations, with the validation against local observational data. This data are further used to localize the information into the scale of modelling study in the framework of local project PERUN, where CP simulations are in progress.

How to cite: Halenka, T., Holtanova, E., and Belda, M.: Validation, Evaluation, and Localization of Climate Change Signal – The Use of IS-ENES3 Analysis Platform Initiative, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-698, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-698, 2022.

The ECMWF training offering covers a wide range of topics in support of operational numerical weather prediction, forecasting, the Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S) and Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS). ECMWF is committed to providing education and training to its Member and Co-operating States as well as the wider meteorological community. During the global COVID pandemic it was essential that the continuity of service was maintained and training courses and events were delivered. As such we had to rapidly adjust the way our courses and events took place while ensuing a high quality learning experience for participants.

Delivering training courses and events online posed challenges for participants, trainers and presenters. Everyone had to adapt to utilising new technology alongside reduced trainer-participant interactions and networking while making sure learning and event objectives were still met and attendees were engaged. To do this ECMWF investigated a number of tools and methods to enhance participant interaction and engagement. These included: gather.town an online environment where participants created avatars and walked around the virtual ECMWF building interacting with each other, this environment was also used for classroom teaching and training activities; Padlet for collaboration and sharing of documents and presentations; so called ‘Social Breaks’ where participants were randomly assigned into rooms for an informal chat akin to in-person coffee breaks; and Q&A and polling features in tools like Zoom, Slido and Vevox to enhance engagement.

In this presentation we will detail and explore the different ways ECMWF have delivered virtual training courses and events, the new tools we have used, the challenges that we have faced and the lessons we have learned for delivering future courses and events.

How to cite: Hemingway, B., Keeley, S., and Stewart, C.: ECMWF’s experiences in virtual training and events, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-65, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-65, 2022.

Today, the vast majority of meteorological data are collected in open, rural environments to comply with the standards set by the World Meteorological Organization. However, these traditional networks lack local information that we need for example for high-resolution numerical weather prediction or to assess climate adaptation measures. The citizen science project called VLINDER uses a novel approach for addressing this observational gap based on an intense collaboration with high schools. The collaboration resulted in the establishment of a region-wide climate monitoring network of about 70 accurate weather stations in a wide variety of locations across northern Belgium e.g. in city centers, forests, lakes, industrial environments,... The stations measure temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind and pressure and data are transferred every 5 minutes via IoT-technology. The resulting data can be consulted in realtime on the project’s dashboard (https://vlinder.ugent.be/dashboard/) which contains an API to extract the data. To guarantee a sustainable and mutually valuable collaboration, the schools and their students are involved at all stages, ranging from proposing measurement locations, building the weather stations, and even data analysis. The approach received overwhelming enthusiasm from high schools and students and resulted in a high-accuracy monitoring network with unique locations offering novel insights. The data collected by the stations are used both by schools who received educational material to explore the data in the classroom and by scientists e.g. to evaluate hectometric NWP runs. With this presentation we would like to share our experiences and the lessons learnt to encourage and help colleagues in exploring and setting up collaborations with schools.

How to cite: Caluwaerts, S., Top, S., Mesuere, B., and Vergauwen, T.: Engaging schools to explore meteorological observational gaps, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-618, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-618, 2022.

The presentation outlines the main features of the double-degree MSc programme in Environmental Meteorology jointly offered by the University of Trento (Italy) and the University of Innsbruck (Austria) since the academic year 2018/19,  and results achieved so far.

The programme welcomes candidates with a solid background in mathematics, theoretical and applied physics, and chemistry.
All lectures are taught in English. The regular duration of the programme is two tears arranged in four terms, scheduled alternately at the two Universities, so as students can get the most out of the specific expertise available on each side.

The curriculum aims at preparing graduates not only with a sound basis in meteorology (including weather analysis and forecasting, atmospheric boundary layer processes,  numerical prediction models), but also interdisciplinary contents connected to a number of environmental applications, such as hydrology, glaciology, agricultural and forest meteorology, renewable energy resources, environmental chemistry, air pollution monitoring, modelling and management.

Students are also stimulated to become familiar with different complementary approaches, including theoretical analysis, numerical modelling, and experimental techniques, specifically oriented to environmental measurements.

Besides class lectures and laboratory exercises, students are offered weekly seminars from visiting speakers, visits to weather stations, meteorological offices, and environmental agencies, as well as opportunities to attend major events related to meteorology.

Special emphasis is devoted to the master thesis project. Students concentrate on their thesis especially in the final semester, and they can work on that at either Univesity, or, upon specific projects and agreements, at partner institutions, such as universities, research bodies or meterological offices, anviroenmental agenices, and so on.  

The preparation offered through this program is meant to prepare professionals enabled not only to work on typical jobs connected to meteorology and climatology, but also to support a variety of environmental applications, such as the assessment of available energy form renewable resources, air quality management, water resource management, applied climatology, agricultural and forest meteorology.

How to cite: Zardi, D.: The double-degree MSc Programme in Environmental Meteorology  jointly offered by the University of Trento (Italy) and the University of Innsbruck (Austria), EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-691, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-691, 2022.