TITLE: Weather services in society: an evolution of usage and engagement over the past 50 years

ABSTRACT: Over the past two decades, interaction between society and meteorological services has
undergone a profound transformation, driven by digitalization, evolving user expectations, and broader
societal challenges. We will examine this evolution through four different aspects: Growth in use,
Commercial evolution, People engaged in meteorology and Societal expectations.

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

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!


[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/

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/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-the-european-meteorological-society/vol/3/suppl/C

The event Meet the Editors enables a direct interaction between members of the Editorial Board and prospective authors and the readership community of JEMS. You are cordially invited to stop by and discuss with members of the Editorial Board.

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.