Full version of HIWeather News Letter in July 2020: 

HIWeather News Letter_July 2020.pdf

July 2020
Dear Colleagues,
The strange world of social distancing, isolation and lockdown continues in varying degrees for most of us and we wish you all to keep yourselves and your loved ones safe and well. Nevertheless, the world has not stopped turning and neither has science stopped, though it may have slowed a bit and become dependent on electronic communication to a frightening degree - it’s fine until the broadband goes down!

Planning has continued for our online workshop, and a call for registration and abstracts has just been issued at http://hiweather.net/. The workshop consist of a series of five weekly online seminars starting in late October, followed by three days of discussions in the first week of December focusing on the HIWeather core objectives: the citizen science initiative; the end-to-end warning chain evaluation; and the “perfect warning system” book. For the citizen science initiative, the workshop will focus on reviewing and adding to a draft Citizen Science guidance note with new material from participants. For the warning value chain initiative, the conference will aim to gather end-to-end studies and to identify the key components needed for the analysis of value. For the book, we review and add to a first complete draft. We expect to use a range of remote participation tools within Blue Jeans to facilitate a successful meeting across multiple time zones.

From the many areas of progress reported in this newsletter, I would like to highlight just three:

The HIGHWAY project, a UK-funded, WMO-led project, closely linked with HIWeather, is focused on severe weather warnings for fishermen on Lake Victoria in East Africa and has led to the introduction of warning services by several of the countries bordering the Lake. It has published a number of reports this year, the most recent of which, “The Power of Partnership”, addresses partnerships between weather services, end users and the media, and is available at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/business/international/wiser/wiser0223_highway_partnership_impact_article_0620.pdf.

The HIWeather Citizen Science project is well underway, with four activities currently taking place: a survey of citizen science projects - if you or a colleague are involved in a citizen science project please respond at https://massey.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aaWCTHai8RFzBqJ; a call for contributions to a special issue; drafting of a WMO guidance note; and preparation for a joint webinar series with the “Young Earth System Science” on citizen science challenges and opportunities, starting in September.

The HIWeather book “Towards the perfect warning” is in preparation: four of the six core chapters have detailed contents mapped out, authors assembled and writing underway. The other chapters will follow very shortly. First drafts are due for all chapters in September, so that a complete draft can be produced for review at the December workshop.

There continue to be a multitude of free online seminars available from several sources that address issues relevant to HIWeather. Do take advantage of some of these, if you can, and share any useful learnings with the rest of the HIWeather community.

In conclusion, I wish you all well through these challenging times. Please keep in touch and contribute, as you are able, to our goal of better weather-related warning systems that save lives, property and livelihoods.

Best wishes,
Brian Golding
HIWeather Co-chair