Value Chain Approaches to Evaluate the End-to-End Warning Chain 

A joint project of the WWRP HIWeather Project and SERA Working Group

Effective warnings of weather-related hazards result from the successful interaction of many people and organisations, each contributing their specific capability and knowledge. The "value chain" provides a useful way to describe the generation and communication of warning data, information, and processes between different stakeholders. By using this approach to study end-to-end warning chains for hazardous weather events, we can learn what worked well and what can be improved.  

This project has two main aims:  

1.    To review value chain practices used to describe weather, warning and climate services to assess and provide guidance on how to apply value chains in a weather warning context involving multiple users and partnerships; 

2.    To create a searchable Warning Chain Database that researchers and practitioners can use to explore the organisation and performance of actual warning chains for high impact events and assess their effectiveness using value chain approaches.  

To develop guidance on how to use value chain approaches we will

a.       develop a conceptual value chain framework for hydrometeorological services that aligns to WMO's Science to Services focus;  

b.       develop an inventory of existing examples of where the value chain has been applied, based on a systematic review of academic and grey literature and workshops;

c.       create a catalogue of value chain usage types and their suitability for assessing efficiency, planning and execution, evaluating projects, quality control, and testing replicability;

d.       prepare an overview of metrics and methods for measuring aspects of the value chain and the whole value chain; 

e.       provide a high-level value chain framework tool for decision makers, and guidance and tools for more specific usage.

To develop the Warning Chain Database we will

a.       collect information on relevant high impact weather events from case studies and post event reviews, linking to existing collections such as the emerging WMO Catalogue of Hazardous Events (WMO-CHE),      ECMWF Severe Event Catalogue, and DRR databases;

b.       review the governance, structure and organisation of selected weather-related warning systems, including identifying the type of value chain used, to define an outline database classification;

c.       conduct in-depth analysis of selected events that highlight an issue of importance to some or all of the warning chain;

d.       design and build a searchable database (aligned with WMO-CHE) to hold and augment the collected data, to enable easy use of the information to answer questions identified by practitioners.

The concept proposal gives greater detail on the Value Chain project, including the types of data to be collected and research questions that could be addressed by the warning chain data.

We are currently preparing a more detailed plan and will seek funding to support some of the work.