Climate Exchange

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nergy

medium-term weather forecasting model at RHMSS. The long-term

vision in research and development activities has been defined in

the ‘South East European Research and Development Programme

of Regional Climate Modeling for 2012-2017’, developed by the

international Expert Workshop which was supported by the

ministerial meeting ‘Climate Change Research for Environmental

Protection, Adaptation and Risk Reduction’ in Belgrade, Serbia,

on 13 April 2011.

Capacity building

SEEVCCC supports the activities of NMHSs in issuing climate

watches, based on monthly climate diagnostics bulletins, anomaly

maps, climate extremes indices, weekly and monthly forecasts and

seasonal predictions. SEEVCCC runs an experimental climate watch

system, which is designed to provide advisories (climate watches)

informing partner NMHSs on ongoing, pending or expected climate

anomalies and their possible negative impacts. Experimental work

in this area is based on the connection of probabilistic long-term

forecast of the standardized precipitation index (SPI), obtained from

the SEEVCCC seasonal prediction modelling system with the SPI

calculated from observations.

Based on SEEVCCC climate monitoring, seasonal forecasting and

climate watch advisories issued on 1 April 2012, which related to

the hot summer and lack of precipitation in the Balkan Peninsula,

RHMSS was able to issue a timely (April/May), detailed climate

warning. Warnings were issued in connection with the heat wave,

drought and weather conditions conducive to the onset of forest

fires, all of which were recorded across the whole territory of Serbia

and SEE during June and July 2012.

The WMO Regional Climate Outlook Forum (RCOF) is a regional

mechanism for the formulation and dissemination of climate

outlooks. RCOF’s consensus forecast process stimulates capacity

development in NMHSs and supports the decisions and activi-

ties which mitigate adverse impacts of climate, while

helping communities to adapt to climate variability

and change. In the European region the RCOF process

was launched in 2008, by establishing the South-East

European Climate Outlook Forum (SEECOF) cover-

ing the countries of the SEE and Caucasus region. The

first SEECOF was held in Zagreb, Croatia in June 2008,

and the second (SEECOF-2) in Budapest, Hungary in

November 2009. SEECOF-3, focusing on summer

2010, was carried out as an online collaborative exer-

cise for the first time since the RCOF mechanism was

established by WMO. This exercise was co-facilitated

by SEEVCCC, the RA-VI Working Group on Climate

and Hydrology and the WMO Secretariat. It proved

that, in the RCOF mechanism, online collaboration

could be used as an efficient and effective alternative

to physical meetings. In line with that, taking into

consideration the capacity-building component of

the RCOFs, it has been agreed that face-to-face meet-

ings of regional experts moderated by leading climate

experts should continue to be organized once a year.

As a follow-up of the fifteenth RA-VI recommendation,

SEEVCCC/RHMSS hosted the SEECOF-4; six face-to-

face sessions focusing on the winter season 2010/2011

and 2011/2012 respectively

as well as the SEECOF-

5; seven online meetings. Efforts are underway to

strengthen the climate change section in SEECOF, and

to achieve sustainability by linking COF with RCC

and promoting their roles in the Global Framework

for Climate Services (GFCS), bridging the gap between

providers and users of climate information.

Other SEEVCCC capacity building activities cover

sub-regional training workshops and the development

Participants at the ministerial meeting ‘Climate Change Research for Environmental Protection, Adaptation and Risk Reduction’ in Belgrade, April 2011

Image: RHMSS