Schematic value chain for high impact weather warning showing the capabilities and outputs (green "mountains") and information exchanges (bridges) linking the capabilities and their associated communities (from Golding et al. GAR2019).

Effective warnings of weather-related hazards result from the successful interaction of many people and organisations, each contributing their specific capability and knowledge, from weather and hazard forecast to impacts, warning communication and decision making. 

The value chain is a useful approach to understand the different relationships, processes, inputs, contributions, outcomes, and operational contexts of each stakeholder in the warning chain. The warning value chain can be represented as a sequence or network of different disciplines reprocessing information from previous segments and adding additional, unique information, as in the figure above.

The Project reviewed value chain approaches used to describe and understand weather, warning and climate services and developed a framework and guidance on how they can be best applied. It described evaluation methods used across the value chain and how they are applied to determine value. The project is also developing a database of past high impact weather case studies for scientists and practitioners to review, analyse and learn from previous experience with weather-related warning systems using value chain approaches.

A project plan is available for further background reading and provides a detailed plan of tasks to perform to deliver the outputs. A 4-minute video presentation about the value chain project is available here. A value chain glossary, the first delivery of the project, provides a rich resource of the terminology used in the project.   The Warning Chain Database Questionnaire (template) and Guide are available for use within the project and by other interested researchers and practitioners. Please use it to document the end-to-end production and flow of information and decision making along the warning chain for a hazardous weather event of interest. This information will:

1.      add to a global database of hazardous weather events with rich information covering the many components of the warning value chain,

2.      enable case studies and cross-cutting analysis of end-to-end warning value chains, from simple to complex, to understand effective practices,

3.      support the value cycle of review and learning from past events to identify improvements that would enhance future warnings.

Transcript of the video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZaY3_YUOHR6eRvTQsTooBDtX3dB52-Gkmq7NUqhUHyY/edit?usp=sharing

A Value Chain Bibliography has been created to summarise relevant literature that has been collected and tagged by the project team using Mendeley reference software. The chapters in this bibliography contain references for groups of documents describing different concepts and components of the information value chain for warnings. A version of the bibliography that includes abstracts is also available.

The Value Chain Project was a joint HIWeather Flagship Project with the WWRP Societal and Economic Research Applications (SERA) Working Group.