The Weather Value Chain for decades has built on collaboration of Academia, instrument providers, National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, and Private Weather Service Providers to deliver data, services and ultimately value to a wide range of users, including government agencies, media, consumers and a wide range of businesses.

This session offers a platform to showcase the utilisation and value of weather information all the way from its origins to the utilisation by end users. Use cases span civil authorities, transportation, tourism, building management, energy, agriculture, and many other sectors.

The session aims further to evaluate the benefits of investments into the meteorological value chain, to build the scientific and political basis for public and private investments, and to share best practices on how the weather value chain can improve the value delivered to society though the wide range of activities, ranging from observations to forecasting and climate services. The session further explores the opportunities for increased collaboration between public, private and academic actors within the Weather Enterprise.

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

This session has evolved from the Open data Session and aims to bring together the providers, software developers and current or prospective users of meteorological and climate data, without shying away from technical details.

Bridging data and delivery: The world is evolving towards an increasingly data-centric ecosystem. Open Data and Open Source have become widespread and partly mandatory across Europe. The challenges of managing growing data volumes and diverse use cases are increasing. Using cloud technologies to distribute and process data has become a common way to address these challenges. To ensure robust operational reliability and true interoperability, appropriate choices of data-management technologies, data formats, software architectures, APIs, and governance processes are essential.

We invite your contributions for these technical topics, user-focused stories, and your thoughts and strategies. Don't spare us from technical details!

Here are some examples:
- Initiatives designed to bring users closer to the data and to enable the processing of large data sets, such as the European Weather Cloud (EWC) [1] and WEkEO [2]
- New Open Data sets, including hosting Open Data on-premises and in the cloud
- Use of clouds to distribute and process data, including cloud-native data formats
- Tools and interfaces (APIs) for distributing, accessing, and exploiting data
- Building data pipelines for open and hybrid access via APIs, in clouds and on-premises
- Operational aspects of data sharing and data-lifecycle management
- Data visualisation and user-facing systems
- Collaborative open-source software development and sustainability
- Integrating AI/ML data pipelines into operational workflows
- Community building and collaboration around data and open-source software
- Data governance topics, policies, and practices
- any other technical details you feel are important to share

[1] https://europeanweather.cloud
[2] https://wekeo.eu

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.

Climate services are widely recognised as playing a central role in supporting climate risk management, adaptation planning, and societal preparedness across sectors and scales. Despite this growing recognition, the uptake and sustained use of climate services remain uneven and, in many contexts, limited. A range of constraints has been identified, including institutional barriers, mismatches between supply and demand, limited capacities, and challenges related to trust, relevance, and usability. Moreover, significant disparities persist across geographical regions, sectors, and user communities, raising questions about for whom climate services create value and under what conditions.

Beyond advances in climate science and modelling, there is increasing recognition that the values and benefits of climate services - economic, social, and environmental - are critical factors in promoting their use and justifying continued investment. In this context, co-creation and co-production processes are increasingly viewed as key mechanisms for enhancing the relevance, legitimacy, and uptake of climate services by aligning climate information with decision-making needs, institutional settings, and societal priorities.

This session invites contributions that critically examine the values and benefits generated by climate services and climate information, together with the co-creation and co- production processes through which such value is shaped, realised, and sustained. The session also welcomes contributions that analyse the climate services market, barriers to uptake, and the factors influencing demand and use across sectors and regions. Overall, the session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on how climate services create value for decision making, policy development, and societal resilience, and on how this value can be assessed, enhanced, and maintained across different contexts.

We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to:
• Economic, social, and environmental valuation and evaluation of climate services and climate information
• Methods and frameworks for assessing benefits, impacts, and outcomes of climate services
• Co-creation and co-production approaches that strengthen the value and support the uptake of climate services
• Institutional, governance, and power dynamics in co produced climate services
• Climate services markets, demand dynamics, and structural barriers to uptake
• Lessons learned from operational, experimental, and pilot climate services
• Monitoring and evaluation approaches implemented in operational climate services
• Case studies across different sectors such as water, agriculture, energy, transportation, coastal management, disaster risk reduction, and others

The Commmunication and Media session will cover the following topics:
• TV weather forecasts including video clips
• AI tools in communication
• 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 includin AI
• 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.

Professional users of weather and climate information as well as the general public often do not distinguish between weather and climate. Answering questions about extreme weather events requires information about both the weather and the current and future climate. Therefore, it seems logical to integrate weather and climate information far more than was often done in the past. Unified products could enable better decisions by combining actual and short-term operational insights with long-term context, improving risk management, interpretation, and strategic planning. These products can also increase awareness of the general public of the effects of climate change. This session encourages the submission of papers focusing on the (co-)development of products, experiences, communication strategies, feedback from users, etc. related to the aforementioned issue. We welcome the submission of papers covering topics such as:

• Products developed to integrate weather and climate (change) information, including ‘seamless’ information provision, including, among others, dashboards, attribution of extreme events, the combination of weather forecasts with seasonal-to-decadal predictions and climate scenarios
• Challenges and issues arising in the integration of weather and climate (change) information, related to e.g. co development/user interaction, communication, presentation of uncertainties, interaction between climate and weather services

This session focuses more on the communication aspects of integrating weather and climate information than on the technical aspects.

Most countries in the EU develop ‘National Climate Scenario’ and related products that can be used for impact and risk assessments and the exploration of adaptation measures. Different nations have taken a range of approaches for the development of national climate scenarios, related products and the communication around the scenarios. Common challenges encountered by the providers are the communication of uncertainties, requests for very high spatial and temporal resolutions, advise on the use of climate scenarios, interactions with users, integration of climate scenarios with impact information, how to deal with new scientific insights, etc.

For this session we encourage submissions on constructing, delivering, using national climate scenarios, among others:

• Challenges in the provision of National climate information – including information gaps and the challenges in communication and providing information in ways that is relevant and accessible;
• Understanding user needs and the way users use climate scenarios, and the role of co-development of climate information and services;
• Comparisons of approaches in different countries;
• Future outlook and new opportunities in the science of scenario products drawing from novel types of information or techniques, e.g. Extreme event Attribution, decadal predictions, high resolution models, AI/ML, and new insights in the climate system and/or policy developments.

This session focuses on education and learning approaches in meteorology and climate science, with an emphasis on how scientific knowledge is taught, experienced, and integrated across different audiences. It provides a platform for contributions that explore both established and emerging educational methods across formal and informal settings.

The session encourages reflection on educational approaches that have been used in the past but were later abandoned or forgotten – not necessarily due to a lack of scientific or pedagogical value, but because they were introduced at an unfavourable time, without adequate context, or before suitable technologies and audiences were ready. With today’s evolving educational environments, digital tools, and increased awareness of climate-related issues, some of these methods may deserve renewed attention. Revisiting and reassessing earlier practices can therefore offer valuable lessons for present and future education.

Contributions may address formal and informal education, including schools, universities, workshops, and lifelong learning. The session explicitly welcomes innovative educational tools such as games, simulations, interactive materials, and data-driven learning resources that foster active engagement and critical thinking.

The session also includes discussions on how meteorology and climate science are presented to prospective students, for example through study programme descriptions, course outlines, and educational materials. The attractiveness, clarity, and relevance of these descriptions play an important role in students’ study choices and long-term engagement with the field.

In addition, the session invites contributions that consider education within the scientific and policy-making communities, recognising the importance of continuous learning among scientists, decision-makers, and professionals working with weather and climate information.

Overall, the session aims to provide a platform for sharing experiences, lessons learned, and innovative ideas that enhance education and public integration in meteorology and climate science, while acknowledging the importance of timing, context, and audience diversity.