In the pursuit of climate neutrality, a critical aspect is fostering collaboration between public, academic and private entities. This session explores the multifaceted dimensions of public-academic-private partnerships in advancing climate neutrality goals. It will provide a platform for researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals to share insights, understand regulations, discuss challenges, and showcase successful models of collaboration.

As we progress to a climate-neutral society, compliance with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) regulation is an increasing challenge for many business sectors across Europe.

The meteorological community has a vital role in this activity. Organisations seeking compliance with the emerging regulatory framework require high-quality data and analyses to enable the assessment of corporate risks associated with a wide range of weather and climate-related factors.

Some key elements are:
• Climate change: quantification of future effects: heat, drought, flood, wildfire etc...
• Impact assessment: what can be done for determining effects on businesses?
• Regulations: what must be done?

A Keynote speaker will provide an overview of the ESG landscape and this will be followed by Presentations and Posters from both Private and Public sector organisations that address the needs of the business community.

Contributions may cover a wide range of topics, such as:
• Policy Frameworks and Governance
• Data Sharing and Integration
• Technology and Innovation
• Capacity Building and Education
• Case Studies of Successful Collaborations


This continues the long-running series of EMS sessions jointly convened jointly by the Public and Private sectors in the Global Weather Enterprise, as represented by:
PRIMET: the Professional Trade Association for meteorological service providers operating in the private sector.
EUMETNET: a network of 33 European National Meteorological Services based in Brussels, Belgium. It exists to provide a framework to organise co-operative programmes between the members in fields of meteorology, data processing and forecasting product.

Extreme meteorological and climatological events affect societies, economies and environments in unprecedented ways and all over the world. Operational meteorological and hydrological service providers and researchers are therefore more and more concerned in the provision and communication of weather and climate risks - considering hazard, exposure and vulnerability drivers - and associated impacts for forecast user communities, decision-makers (such as civil protection etc.) and the public. The ultimate goal of these activities are to trigger preventive actions, minimize fatalities and losses, improve resilience and boost adaptation and mitigation measures.

While this sounds convincing and simple on paper, it involves various technical, methodological, and strategic requirements and transdisciplinary challenges. In particular, user engagement, co-design and stakeholder management are important prerequisites to develop successful operational products and services. This session therefore aims to assemble relevant actors and findings from all involved parties and disciplines at the interface of weather and climate risks and impact-based services. It seamlessly unites weather and climate scales and natural and social sciences to make the best use of risk and impact information for citizens and society. We therefore invite a broad international and interdisciplinary exchange on the following aspects:

- latest research and findings on risks and impacts of weather and climate extremes to societies, economies and environments, including terminology and concepts of risk,

- risk- and impact-based forecasts and warnings to enhance the value of weather and climate services in society, including probabilistic forecasts and uncertainty,

- demonstrators or operational services for weather and climate risk assessments,

- identification of gaps, needs and transdisciplinary challenges to co-design successful services and products,

- application of novel, ideally open data sources for exposure, vulnerability and socioeconomic impacts (losses and damages) for risk and impact assessments and their validation,

- methodologies, such as software and models, for the development and provision of risk and impact assessments

We reserve the option to convert talks into poster contributions to ensure a focused and impactful session.

This session encourages the submission of papers focusing on the engagement strategies and governance structures for climate services as they emerge from national and international efforts. This includes also the large international effort on climate services such as, for example, Copernicus, Destination Earth, My climate risk, or the Global Framework on Climate Services.

We welcome the submission of papers covering topics such as:
• Mechanisms and structures for establishing and maintaining sustainable climate services and partnerships between researchers, providers, and translators, and managing expectations of users
• Communicating capabilities and limitations of climate information (including trust, usability, and uncertainty)
• Challenges and issues arising in the provision of information about high-impact climate extremes
• Interaction with major research initiatives such as, for European downscaling, Euro-CORDEX, Med-CORDEX and VALUE and, with respect to earth observations and climate predictions and projections, the COPERNICUS programme
• Examples of information being used to support decision or policy making
• The interaction between climate and weather services

We also welcome submissions which are reflecting on:
• The need for information on different timeframes and spatial scales
• The climate service requirements emerging from different types of users, providers, and intermediaries
• Comparisons of different approaches to climate services being taken in different countries
• How the different funding and access models (e.g., publicly-funded, commercial services) lead to different typologies of services

Models’ increasing capabilities to capture environmental phenomena at higher and more joined-up resolutions is blurring formerly distinct boundaries between weather, climate and air quality services. It is well established that the scale of the issue being modelled – e.g., an expected climate change impact – and the scale at which it is governed must be aligned to effectively create change. Yet only recently have real-world issues started to be treated as multi-scalar, requiring a degree of continuity between one type of scale framing and another.

A lack of awareness that scale framing varies across scientific disciplines, is dynamic, and is a socially and politically constructed process risks delaying the effective deployment of weather, climate and air quality services. For example, the physical sciences often equate spatial and temporal scale with a model resolution, while in the social sciences or ecology scale refers to the conceptual hierarchy of spaces and their interplay to reflect levels of organisation in the real world. Even within the physical sciences, research communities providing air quality and weather forecasts and those providing climate predictions and projections have traditionally worked in silos, using different methods, models, language and, of course, scales. These academic divides make no sense to most practitioners, where planning and decision making often simultaneously considers different time horizons, spatial resolutions, and types of environmental stressor.

What’s more, new types of modelling (e.g. seamless and km-scale climate models) are attracting new types of decision makers to these services. While co-production efforts have worked hard to show that one size of service doesn't fit all users, effort is now needed to show that that one scale doesn't fit all either.

We thus envisage a transdisciplinary session, welcoming submissions from practitioners and researchers to kick-start a collaborative, scale-related, community of practice. As long as each presentation foregrounds the issue of scale, we are open to the background setting it draws on (it may be a model, a co-production experience, a societal need etc.). We aim to actively facilitate the debate around three staging points:

1) Setting scales: Why scale is important to a particular phenomenon/use case, e.g. to:
a) resolve specific environmental phenomena, like urban canyon effects, or
b) align with decision making contexts, like at a municipal or basin level.
2) Crossing scales: How similar information can be provided across different framings of the same dimension, e.g.,
a) seamless climate services providing comparable information across prediction/projection timescales.
3) Transforming scales: Where reframing the scale of an issue can answer different questions or achieve different outcomes, e.g.,
a) zooming in, like overlaying climate predictions with air quality forecasts to map heat–health vulnerabilities, or
b) zooming out, like extrapolating lessons learned during local co-production efforts to designing regional-level services.

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+++ EMS Open Data Stipend by ECMWF -- apply until 31 Mar 2024, 23:59 CEST -- see last part of session description +++
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Open Data policies have become both popular and mandatory across Europe. While several countries and institutions have adopted already a wide-open data policy, the EU Open Data Directive [1] is changing the landscape even more in the coming years.

In meteorology and climate science, a variety of European and international organizations provide access to vast amounts of relatively heterogeneous climatological data. Open data is having a growing impact on science and services, including more and more critical applications by both public and private sectors, by met services, companies, research institutes, and open source developers.

To tame the variety and sheer amount of data, API and data format standardization plays a key role in the ecosystem. Especially, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR) API has begun to permeate through the domain.

Additionally, it is more and more common to exploit clouds to distribute and process Open Data. Initiatives like European Weather Cloud [2], WEkEO [3], and Open Data on AWS [4] are specially built to bring users to data and make processing large data sets possible.

The aim of the session is to bring together the enablers, providers, and current/future users of Open Data in meteorology and climate, to share their experiences and requirements.

We invite contributions on both technical and user-focused topics related to

- New Open Data sets including hosting Open Data on-premise and in the cloud
- Effects of and preparing for the new EU Open Data Directive
- Metadata management including FAIR principles [5]

- Use of clouds to distribute and process Open Data, including cloud-native data formats
- Tools and interfaces (APIs) for distributing, accessing, and utilizing Open Data

- Existing Open Data applications using weather or climate data
- New ideas about where and how Open Data can serve society
- Opportunities and challenges regarding Open Data, including data sources, data formats, legal issues ...

- Community building and collaboration around Open Data
- Whatever you feel is necessary to tell about Open Data!

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+++ EODS - EMS Open Data Stipend - apply until 31 Mar 2024, 23:59 CEST +++
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We offer the opportunity to attend our Open Data session at EMS2024 with financial support from ECMWF: "EODS" is short for "EMS participation stipend for the Open Data Session, funded by ECMWF". This funding opportunity is meant for open source developers and other people active in open data who do not have an affiliation that can finance them attending EMS2024. We will support up to three persons as presenting authors in the session, either online or onsite depending on the number of applicants and contributions. We reimburse the chosen candidates for the online or onsite registration fee [6] plus one abstract processing fee [7] in our session.

Please note that EODS cannot offer financial support for any other costs beside above-mentioned abstract processing fees and registration fees.

Independent of this Open Data session stipend, EMS offers a registration fee waiver [8].

How EODS works:

Do not submit your abstract to EMS yet. Mail to open-data-community-editor@lists.ecmwf.int, including
- your abstract
- a very short CV
- a description of the lack of affiliation to finance EMS abstract and participation fees
- whether you applied for a registration fee waver

The deadline for sending your mail to us is 31 March 2024, 23:59 CEST.

We will notify you until 11 April if you win an EODS and if yes, if it is for online or onsite participation. Sou you will have another week after our notification to submit your abstract to our session via the EMS conference website.

We will notify the EMS organizing team of the winners - so you will not receive invoices but your invoice for the APF will be paid directly by ECMWF.

Remember to
- submit your abstract before 18 April via EMS website [9]
- make use of the early bird registration [6] - for online or onsite attendance according to our notification

Note that EODS cannot cover travel costs. It supports the abstract processing fee for the Open Data session plus early registration for online or onsite participation.

If you have any questions, please send a mail to open-data-community-editor@lists.ecmwf.int.

[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/psi-open-data
[2] https://europeanweather.cloud
[3] https://www.wekeo.eu
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/opendata
[5] https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/
[6] https://www.ems2024.eu/venue_and_attend/registration.html
[7] https://www.ems2024.eu/abstract_management/how_to_submit_an_abstract.html#APF
[8] https://www.ems2024.eu/about/support/registration_fee_waiver.html
[9] https://www.ems2024.eu/about/updates/call_for_abstracts.html

Many European institutions, including national hydrometeorological services, universities, private companies, and donor organizations, are involved in projects aiming to assist with the development of weather and climate services in developing and emerging countries and thereby support the achievement of several Sustainable Development Goals. This effort has recently been strengthened through funding mechanisms such as the Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF) or the Climate Risk Early Warning Systems (CREWS) initiative, involving various European institutions. The session will foster the exchange of information on recent, ongoing, or planned co-development initiatives in developing and emerging countries, providing a platform to exchange knowledge, lessons learned and good practice on effective co-development and scientific and practical achievements in the field of meteorology and climatology.
The session invites contributions from those working on initiatives aiming to enable countries from the developing world to improve their weather and climate service capability, such as
• the enhancement and coordination of technical and organizational infrastructure,
• the development of new weather and climate services products,
• the implementation and optimization of procedures and methods, capacity building for technical and general management,
• the enhancement of education and training, the strengthening of service mindedness,
• the development of scientific capability in meteorological and climatological topics, and the related knowledge gain,
• the facilitation and fostering of international collaboration, and
• the coordination of relevant donors and funding opportunities.

Particularly welcome are presentations on lessons learnt on in development projects, including examples of good practice and success stories, alongside reports on difficulties and challenges encountered, as well as meta-initiatives aiming at facilitating communication and collaboration. Pure methodological discussions, however, are left to other topical sessions in the OSA program stream.

The Commmunication and Media session will cover the following topics:
• TV weather forecasts including video clips
• media and climate change issue
• use of social media to convey weather and climate information
• ways to present climatological information in an appealing way for the media and general public
• effective communication of science, scientific ideas and concepts, and research results
• warnings in case of severe weather events, role of different media in the warning system, a single voice concept
• internet as efficient and popular media in meteorology
• monthly meteorological bulletins and annals
• radio as a traditional media for delivering weather data and forecasts
• development of new communication strategies and use of social media
• tips on how to interact with users and journalists
• perception of provided information among users
• use of new technologies
• role of press officers within the National weather services
• role of science journals and publishers
• communicating uncertainty in seasonal forecast and climate projections

Scientists communicate to non-peer audiences through numerous pathways including websites, blogs, public lectures, media interviews, and educational collaborations. A considerable amount of time and money is invested in this public engagement and these efforts are to a large extent responsible for the public perception of science. However, few incentives exist for researchers to optimize their communication practices to ensure effective outreach. This session encourages critical reflection on science communication practices and provides an opportunity for science communicators to share best practice and experiences with evaluation and research in this field.

DEALING with UNCERTAINTIES
This session will also include examples of how science can and should support decision-making. In this context a special section this year will be dedicated to the highly important issue of Dealing with Uncertainties:

Weather forecasts have matured substantially in providing reliable probabilistic predictions, with a useful quantification of forecast uncertainties. Including this information in the communication of forecasts and warnings, and integrating it into downstream models and decision-making processes has become increasingly common practice.

Including uncertainties not only implies the interpretation of ‘raw’ uncertainty information in ensemble forecasts, their post-processing, and visualization, but also the integration of a wide range of non-meteorological aspects such as vulnerability and exposure data to estimate risk and the social, psychological and economic aspects which affect human decision-making.

In this session, we aim to support a holistic perspective on issues that arise when making use of uncertainty information of weather forecasts in decision processes and applications.

The European Meteorological Society (EMS) has launched their new Journal of the European Meteorological Society (JEMS). JEMS is a peer-reviewed, open access online journal, publishing international research and review articles of general interest and relevance about weather, climate and related fields. The journal is published by Elsevier B.V.
https://www.emetsoc.org/introducing-the-new-journal-of-the-ems/

All the aspects of education and training in atmospheric sciences are addressed: Starting at school levels we are interested in the role and place of meteorology, climatology and related sciences in national curricula. At universities, the content and methods of curricula in atmospheric sciences and related fields, are of common interest for comparing and assessing the different European traditions and schools. Especially, presentations on new techniques of teaching used for individuals (web-oriented materials available, e-learning courses, etc.) should enable to share best practices. Lifelong education and further training of meteorological personnel in NMSs as well as private companies and other stakeholders is necessary in line with the rapid development of the related disciplines, including experience from existing activities (like EUMETCAL, EUMETRAIN) and other projects. In addition, outreach to the broader public belongs to the contemporary tasks of science, information for and training of non-professional has become vital, while new communication tools enable direct feedbacks with the room for real citizen science development.

In particular we encourage contributions related to:
• Practices and advances in atmospheric science education;
• The role of atmospheric sciences knowledge in the education process (in school subjects like physics, geography, etc.);
• The organisation of education and training in meteorology and climatology;
• The role and methods of school activities and programmes for atmospheric sciences outreach and education;
• The presence and content of meteorology, climatology and hydrology in national curricula at all levels of education throughout Europe and beyond;
• New educational material or concepts of atmospheric science education to reach the general public;
• The generation of content for media, such as instructive images and movies or interactive visualizations, to facilitate communication with non-professionals.
• Use of citizen science in atmospheric science education;
• The provision of climate science advice for governments, stakeholders and decision-makers;
• The use of new technologies and advances in atmospheric science education, e.g., on computer-aided learning, web-based courses or other resources presenting contemporary problems and tasks of atmospheric sciences;
• The role and the impact of these methodologies in professional training (universities, NMSs), including among others EUMETCAL and EUMETRAIN;
• Educational aspects of EU and national projects and initiatives;
• The role of EU common standards in education and training for personnel involved in meteorological offices and private companies.