The WeatherPod (13 – 18)

They examine the key issues that have emerged which suggest how – and why – the Global Weather Enterprise could provide better and more useful products to support a growing number of weather affected activities and to help address climate change.

The World Energy & Meteorology Council (WEMC) is a company limited by guarantee, headquartered at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and incorporated in November 2015. WEMC’s mission is to promote sustainable energy for a low-carbon economy, enhance resilience of energy infrastructure and improve efficiency of energy systems.

WEMC leads and contributes to several projects, including Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and EU H2020. Specifically, WEMC has been coordinating the C3S Energy operational service and is a partner in the H2020 SECLI-FIRM and FOCUS-Africa projects. WEMC contributions span the more technical side of meteorological services as well as communication, design, exploitation of output, stakeholder engagement, including the organisation of an international conference Energy and Meteorology.

WEMC works also closely with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with which it signed an MOU a few years ago. Moreover WEMC has several other collaborations such with EDF, RTE, ENEL Foundation.

Importantly, WEMC has developed a versatile and user friendly climate visualisation tool, used by energy experts and high school students alike. It’s called TEAL and is free to view it and use it at tealtool.earth

Over the past two decades or so, great efforts have been made to create an economic framework for the provision of meteorological services. The main aim being to make a case to sustain or increase public investment in these services and so reduce the losses to life and property due to severe weather. Alongside this, the global weather enterprise has grown to meet increased demand for weather-related information to assist day-to-day business decision making and the development and application of new technologies.

Now though, we not only face the challenge of extreme weather, but we must also adapt to and mitigate the threat of imminent climate change. As a result, the demand for weather information to help decarbonise society and make it more resilient can only increase.

Thomas Frei is the CEO of Research and Consulting in Zurich since 2012. Prior to that Thomas worked for the Federal Office of Meteorological and Climatology in the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs.

This is the second episode of The WeatherPod produced in collaboration with the Young Earth System Scientists (YESS) Community.

Dr Nina Ridder is a Research Associate at the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC), University of New South Wales.

Nina joined the Centre in the beginning of 2019. Her work focuses on compound climate and weather extremes, and extreme precipitation. As such, Nina addresses the occurrence of multiple natural hazards that have been associated to the most severe socio-economic damages in New South Wales over the past decades.

She uses multivariate statistics to determine any statistical dependency and correlation between hazards and aims to identify the physical processes driving multiple hazards. I In detail, this includes the statistical relationship between precipitation, wind, and high temperatures as well as the occurrence of sequences of two or more east-coast low pressure systems hitting NSW.

Additionally to her work focusing on NSW, Nina also investigates multivariate hazards on the global scale to establish possible spatio-temporal links between different regions and their natural hazards around the world.

Dr Faith Taylor is a physical geographer with interests in geographic information systems (GIS), spatial modelling, statistics and natural hazards. She is a Lecturer in Physical Geography Education in the Department of Geography.

Faith has a MSc in Environmental Modelling, Monitoring and Management and a PhD from King’s College London. Her PhD thesis focused on statistical patterns in triggered landslide event inventories and the development of a landslide road impact model.

Between 2015 and 2017, she undertook two post-doctoral research positions at King’s College London, with a focus on hazard and risk in towns and cities in the Global South. These projects were ‘Urban Africa Risk Knowledge’ and ‘Why we Disagree about Resilience’.

Between 2017 and 2019 she was a Lecturer in Geographic Information System (GIS) at the University of Portsmouth.

During her PhD and postdoctoral research at King’s, she co-founded Intrepid Explorers, which is a platform to promote the value of field-based research in education and inspire others to do safe and impactful field research. With colleagues, she also established King’s Humanitarian Mappers, which is a group of staff and students who run ‘mapathons’ (mapping marathons) to put remote and vulnerable places on maps that are available to all.

Both Nina and Faith are members of the Young Earth System Scientists community, (YESS).

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence methods are gaining popularity in weather & climate research and, in some cases, enhancing forecasting skills. Looking ahead, they may even replace traditional methods of forecasting.

In this episode of the WeatherPod we’ll be discussing some current research problems that are benefitting from the use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence with two early career scientists – Yuhan (Douglas) Rao, a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies in the US, and Chen Chen, a Senior Research Scientist at the Centre for Climate Research Singapore.

Both Doug and Chen are members of the Young Earth System Scientist community which has helped to facilitate this episode and provide a glimpse of the innovative research in our field being carried out by the next generation of scientists.

Subbiah has had a long and distinguished career in the Indian government implementing development and disaster risk reduction programs before moving to the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center where he began building a regional project to strengthen institutional capacities to create end-to-end early warning systems. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, this transformed into RIMES with Subbiah as the founding Director with the mission to develop a multi-hazard framework for the generation and communication of early warning information for all member countries.