Warning Week

From 4 to 7 October 2010 the EUMETSAT sponsored training project EUMeTrain will organise an event week on weather warnings. This event week consists of several online sessions dealing with weather warning and its forecasting, nowcasting and monitoring with the use of NWP, and remote sensing tools such as the geostationary and polar orbiting satellites and radar.

The sessions will also include talks about Meteoalarm, case studies and expert sessions on new developments in dealing with high impact weather and the information to the media. Participants are also encouraged to discuss and share experiences

Registration for this event week is closed! When you have registered you will automatically receive the required invitation. For those of you that will miss this event, all the sessions will be recorded for download.

	Monday 4th October 2010	Tuesday 5th October 2010	Wednesday 6th October 2010	Thursday 7th October 2010
		SESSION 2	SESSION 4
08.00 UTC		Michael Staudinger (ZAMG, Meteoalarm)	Eerik Saarikalle (FMI)
		Tanja Renko (DHMZ)	Juha Tuomala (FMI)
	SESSION 1	SESSION 3	SESSION 5	SESSION 6
12.00 UTC	Carla Barroso (IM)	High Impact Weather WG (EUMETCAL)	Frank Kroonenberg (KNMI)	Wilfried Jacobs (DWD)
	Nuno Moreira (IM), Andreas Wirth (ZAMG)	High Impact Weather WG (EUMETCAL)	Rob Groenland (KNMI)	Veronika Zwatz-Meise (ZAMG)

Session 1:
The first session will start with a presentation of the Land SAF by Carla Barroso on the "Fire Radiative Power" product which was developed in Land SAF and is used by IM (Portugal) assessing the risk of forest fires. The presentation will be followed by Nuno Moreira who will talk about the forest fires in Portugal this summer and a presentation by Andreas Wirth on the forest fires in Russia. Both latter presentations will include lots of satellite material.

Session 2:
Michael Staudinger, project leader of Meteoalarm and director of the Austrian Meteorological and Geodynamical Service ZAMG, will present Meteoalarm. Meteoalarm offers a universally understood system using symbols and colour-coded maps provides the latest warnings of expected severe weather for the next 48 hours over most of Europe. The presentation will be followed by Tanja Renko of DHMZ. She will describe the warning system that was active in Croatia before joining the Meteoalarm. Then the decision process in giving a warning for Meteoalarm and the local authorities will be described using an example of a real warning case.

Session 3:
Presentation from the "High Impact Weather" Working Group from EUMETCAL.
The group will present their activities, focusing on the meaning of "High Impact Weather" and discuss with the audience how it relates to day-to-day forecasting and society.
Some case studies will be shown as "appetizers" for discussion and the audience will be questioned on local forecasting experiences and impacts.

Session 4:
The title of Eerik Saarikalle's presentation will be "Heavy rain warnings in Finland"; Rainfall warnings have not been issued in Finland until 2009. In the earlier years heavy rain forecasting was considered to be a too challenging task. However, growing demand for warnings together with some advancements in forecasts have changed this. Nowadays FMI provides warnings for the general public, authorities and commercial clients. In this presentation FMI's heavy rain warnings are presented and discussed. The session will be continues by a presentation from Juha Tuomala also from FMI. Finnish warnings are issued on 24/7 routines via radio, television and www. Warnings are provided for general public, authorities and commercial clients. Warnings are issued for the next 24 hours in advance, but in future outlooks for some days in advance will be issued in near future. In weather situations where it is estimated that weather will be hazardous an extra forecaster monitors the situation and makes situation awareness reports for authorities. Also authority bulletins for general public are possible in severe weather situations.
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Session 5:
KNMI takes great interest in collaborative decision making within the process towards issuing severe weather warnings. Collaborative decision making will equalize individual peak reactions by forecasters, it will also decrease the stress often felt by shift meteorologists in the onset phase towards a severe weather event. For this reason KNMI has implemented several consulting procedures within its new warning system.

During the first part of this presentation Frank Kroonenberg will tell you about setting objective warning threshold, the warning colour assignment system and will give more details on the decision making process that leads to a warning for extreme weather or even a weather alarm the highest state of warnings in the Netherlands

In the second part Rob Groenland will look into more detail in the July 14 th case of 2010. He will describe the meteorological part on the synoptic- and mesoscale. Furthermore he pays attention to the decision making process that finally lead to the issuing of a regional weatheralarm for parts of the Netherlands that evening. Not only beforehand it is important the follow the procedures carefully but also in the aftermatch it’s essential to collect all the feedback and communication that took place between the expert- and weatheralarmteam but also from customers, end users and general public. Finally he shows you the results of an extensive KNMI damage survey that took place in the area of the most severe damage.

Session 6:
Presentation by Wilfried Jacobs (DWD) on the warning system at Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). The presentation will be followed by Veronika Zwatz-Meise of ZAMG. She will talk about the different products available and incorporated in the warning system at ZAMG. Latter part of her presentation will be used to summarise and discuss the different warning systems in Europe in which the participants are challenged but even more encouraged to take part.