Towards largely automated monthly and annual climate reports for Switzerland

The Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss has the mandate to keep the Swiss population informed about the status of the local climate and climate change. For this purpose, MeteoSwiss is providing a series of recurring bulletins that appear on a monthly, seasonal and annual basis and in three national languages. These bulletins are mainly produced for the media as a blog post on the MeteoSwiss website (meteoswiss.admin.ch) and the MeteoSwiss smartphone app two days before the end of the respective period (preliminary data), and as a PDF for download on the website ten days after the end of the reported period (definite data). In addition, the recurring bulletins are accompanied by situational reports on weather events and climatological issues throughout the year.

Over the last twelve years, this variety of information has been published largely regardless of changes in the media landscape, publication channels, reading habits and user demands. A closer look at our portfolio of reports showed the following key findings:

• The main effort of written reporting on climate in Switzerland today lies in the recurring bulletins despite a great potential for automation.
• Several recurring reports build on each other, some of which are redundant.
• In recent years, there have been occasional bottlenecks in the resources available, particularly at the end of months or seasons when the recurring reports are due.
• Currently, there are major gaps in MeteoSwiss climate information, especially on the local scale (cantonal, communal) and in event reporting.
• The coverage of target groups shows that the focus of certain reports could be sharpened.
• The distribution channels for the individual bulletins and reports should be revised.

As a consequence of this analysis, MeteoSwiss is about to revise its climate communication. The long-term goal of the project is to automate the recurring bulletins as much as possible, in order to make more resources available for event reporting. The automation has other benefits, e.g., with regard to regionalization of climate information or by simplifying the adaptation of certain reports to different target groups. MeteoSwiss has already gained positive experience with automated reports (e.g., bulletin for energy management). Here, we show how we plan to automate the climate bulletins, which form the reports are expected to take, what tools we are planning to apply for this purpose and how we intend to intensify event reporting.