Co-development of weather, early warning, and climate services in Ukraine

Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center (UHMC) have together worked towards enhancing weather, early warning, and climate services in Ukraine since January 2022. The co-development includes automating the whole value chain of service provision from observation station to customer interface. Additionally, the impact of war on air quality and hydrometeorological observation infrastructure have been analyzed.   

In addition to developing weather and early warning information exchange with general public, national stakeholders and customers through enhancing service provision, UHMC aims at exchanging information with European meteorological services. As a result of development collaboration with FMI, UHMC publishes operationally land and marine area early warnings in CAP format through Meteo Alarm programme. In return, UHMC is provided with weather forecast data from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast and South-East European platform, as well as European weather radar data from EUMETNET OPERA programme.

Enhancing the visbility and creditability of UHMC is a measure of success for the collaboration project. Thus, the next steps of FMI-UHMC collaboration will include enhancing web page platform to effectively share new products and the implementation of mobile phone application to ensure an easy access to weather and early warning information as well as to reach people in the most vulnerable situation with the best effort basis.      

The bilateral collaboration project between Finland and Ukraine in the field of meteorology has been funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. During the 2024 annual meeting of the European Meteorological Society the key results of the project as well as identified best practices in successful peer-to-peer learning will be presented.