In this work, we would share our experience in science communication through various (un)conventional tools that we have utilized over the past five years. While some of these tools may seem familiar, such as promotional materials with logos like umbrellas and ties commonly used by firms for their clients, we have strived to imbue them with additional value as communication tools for promoting the work of DHMZ and educating the public. Additionally, we have created several videos, ranging from homemade productions using freely available online tools to professional videos crafted by students from the Academy of Dramatic Arts.

One of the main challenges we encountered during video production was communicating that the activities of DHMZ are not limited to weather forecasting, but also encompass research and services that may not be as visible to the general public but are integral to a wide range of human activities. Starting in 2019, we also began publishing a calendar. Initially, the idea was to showcase stunning photographs from Croatian photographers who participated in the WMO competition. However, over time, the calendar has evolved into a powerful communication tool.

This year, we have also produced a brochure. While our initial intent was to simply highlight our work, the brochure has transformed into a comprehensive monograph filled with additional information about our research activities and results. The brochure, also, bridges the offline and online worlds by utilizing QR codes that guide readers of the printed brochure to content on the website.

We believe that effective science communication is crucial in bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and its impact on society, and we are committed to exploring innovative ways to effectively communicate the value of our work to diverse audiences.

How to cite: Špoler Čanić, K. and Grljak, I.: Everything could be science communication tool, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-450, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-450, 2023.

Glossaries, meteorological terminologies and dictionaries play an important role in disseminating scientific knowledge of the atmospheric sciences. Currently hundreds of glossaries and meteorological terminologies can be found in many languages that cover many regions and countries. However, few of them were published before 1950 (Miloslav et al., 2022). One of the oldest publications is the Catalan meteorological terminology (Fontserè, 1948), wrote in Catalan language, an unofficial language those years, to include Catalan as a scientific language. Despite it was written in 1941, was not published until 1948 due to political reasons.

Based on the original work done by Fontserè (1948), an update of the meteorological terminology in Catalan has been done including new terms and language expressions that have appeared in the period from 1948 to 2023, after 75 years after the original publication. Some of these new terms were defined by the authors previously, such us the anthropocloud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropogenic_cloud ; Mazon et al., 2012), the flash heat (https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Flash_heat, Mazon et al., 2014), or the meteodiversity (Mazon and Pino, 2017), among others.

An analysis about the number and the topics of the new terminology included in the updated version has been performed to evaluate the temporal evolution of the meteorological and climatology terminology and the knowledge of the atmospheric sciences since 1948. For instance, lot of terms on climate change and numerical simulation included in the new version cannot be found in the original work. An update of such old terminology is an opportunity to understand how meteorological language has changed, to disseminate the meteorological and climatological sciences, and also to quantify and understand the interest focus on these atmospheric sciences during the past decades.

References:

Fontserè E., 1948: Assaig d'un vocabulari meteorològic català. Institut d'Estudis Catalans. Barcelona.

Mazon J., Costa M., Pino D., Lorente J., 2012: Clouds caused by human activities. Weather, 67, 11, 302–306.

Mazon J., Pino D., and Barriendos M., 2014: Rapid and sudden advection of warm and dry air in the Mediterranean Basin. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 14, 235–246, doi:10.5194/nhess-14-235-2014.

Mazon J., Pino D. (2017) Meteodiversity: a new concept for quantifying meteorological diversity. Weather 72(5):143–145

Müller, M., Kocánová B., and Zacharov P., 2022: Meteorological Glossaries and Dictionaries: A Review of Their History and Current State. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 103, E157–E180, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0295.1.

How to cite: Mazon, J., Pino, D., Hernández, A., and Costa, M.: Analysis and evolution of the meteorological terminology from the update of the “essay on a Catalan meteorological vocabulary (1948)”, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-166, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-166, 2023.

The mobile weather app nowadays represents the most important channel for MeteoSwiss to communicate its forecasts and warnings to the general public. The forecast presentation on the app has evolved from an initially deterministic format to now also include probabilistic elements. However, these first steps towards including uncertainty information have provoked mixed user feedback, highlighting the challenge of effectively communicating uncertainty information to our stakeholders. If communicated effectively, forecast uncertainty information leads to better decisions thus illustrating the added value of such information (Joslyn and LeClerc, 2013). 

To address this challenge, we have started an effort to explore new ways effectively communicating forecasts and their uncertainty and will present examples of new visualizations. We start from the existing and well-established forms of forecast visualizations including time series of forecasts and spatial maps and extend these to convey forecast uncertainty in an intuitive and thus effective manner. To gauge the effectiveness of these new visualizations, we will perform end-users evaluations. Such end-user evaluations are seen as key element but represent a substantial effort: There is a risk of rejecting promising concepts if the prototype visualization is not of sufficient visual quality, as graphical details may decide on acceptance or rejection by end-users. Our ultimate goal is to enable the general public to take well-informed and thus better decisions by improving their understanding of the uncertainty associated with weather forecasts and warnings. 

Susan Joslyn and Jared LeClerc, Decisions With Uncertainty: The Glass Half Full, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 22, 4, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413481473

How to cite: Spirig, C., Willemse, S., Zukanovic, F., Bessenbacher, V., Bhend, J., and Moret, L.: Communicating Uncertainty in Weather Forecasts and Warnings: Challenges and Visualization Examples, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-540, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-540, 2023.

Objective and Background

Probabilistic forecasts have been promoted by meteorologists for years. However, the use of probabilistic forecasts in the energy sector is still limited. One reason for that is that many real-world decision processes and applications to manage the power system are not designed to integrate uncertain information.

The objective of this presentation is to introduce ProPower, the Probabilistic Power Forecast Evaluation Tool developed at DLR. The main purpose of ProPower is to assess the value of probabilistic power forecasts for PV and wind power systems compared to the usage of deterministic forecasts that do not contain any uncertainty information. Different sources of probabilistic forecasts may be ranked and tested. Finally, a robust analysis on how the value of wind and solar forecasts depends on the power system infrastructure and the power markets considered will be conducted.

Method

Usual approaches to derive the cost-optimal power dispatch within a market region and where power constraints (e.g. grid capacities) are fully considered do not account for the potential balancing costs arising from forecast errors in wind and solar. Dispatch decisions based on pure deterministic forecasts lead to sub-optimal market clearing as shown by Morales et al. [2014] for a simplistic network. To overcome this issue they proposed a stochastic market clearing model. In this model, average balancing costs are estimated from a set of scenarios of renewables feed-in that are equivalent to ensemble members from an ensemble prediction system. The ProPower tool is capable of simulating more complex power systems being mainly restricted by the computational expenses of the optimization problem. A second market clearing based on updated forecasts of higher skills has been implemented and tested. Currently, we use ECMWF ensemble forecasts [Leutbecher and Palmer, 2007] for the day-ahead market clearing and the intraday market clearing. The amount of required balancing is determined by the deviation of forecasted renewables feed-in to feed-in computed from ERA5 reanalysis.

Principal Findings

We found that stochastic market clearing reduces total power system cost by saving balancing power compared to the conventional market clearing even for more complex networks. Furthermore, the use of forecast updates in an intraday market is beneficial as extreme day-ahead forecasts errors do not need to be balanced with more expensive balancing energy at the time of power delivery.

Conclusion

The ProPower tool is capable to translate probabilistic forecast skill into benefits for the power system respecting important characteristics of the real-world power system (i.e. network constraints and layouts, varying costs for different producers, flexibility options). ProPower has the potential to analyze which forecasts errors are most expensive to balance and how valuable skillful uncertainty information from different sources is.

How to cite: Bents, H., von Bremen, L., Schyska, B., and Buller, C.: ProPower: Evaluating the impact of weather forecast uncertainty in power systems management, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-246, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-246, 2023.