Chairpersons: France-Audrey Magro, Thomas Kox
The Teal tool enables a non-expert user to visualise and explore climate variables and carbon emissions. A global map shows climate data by country and sub-country, for temporal resolutions from annual to daily. Currently Teal shows data produced from ERA5 reanalysis from 1950, it will shortly be expanded to include additional data sources such as observations and projections of future climate, with other developments planned. Documentation and guidance are included for users, with functionality and data periodically revised.
Teal was built on previous Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) demonstration tools: the European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM, 2015-2018) demo and the C3S Climate & Energy Educational Demo (Edu Demo, 2019-2020). The Edu Demo won the 2021 C3S Gala award for 'Creating impactful visualization and communication material and promoting C3S to user communities’. Teal considerably evolved under the recently completed (October 2021) H2020 SECLI-FIRM project, and is being further developed under ongoing projects such as the H2020 FOCUS-Africa.
Teal was originally designed to raise awareness and provide data and visualisation about climate change and related energy issues. A key objective was to provide a good user experience which allowed students and educators to easily navigate options on the interface. Based on users’ feedback, it was realised that Teal is attractive and functional for both business and educational users alike. As a result, Teal is available both for public dissemination (free access) and for commercial climate services.
Teal has been developed by the World Energy and Meteorology Council (WEMC), WEMC was established in 2015 and is an organisation based at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. WEMC works with stakeholders around the world to promote and enhance interaction between the energy industry and the weather, climate and wider environmental sciences communities.
How to cite: Boorman, P., Troccoli, A., Bertocco, E., Boyer, W., Dubus, L., Cordeddu, S., Contreras, B., Correa, N., Hibbert, S., Nielsen, K., Obahoundje, S., Saravanan, S., Turrisi, G., and Walker, S.: Teal: a visualisation tool for non-expert users to explore climate data, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-431, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-431, 2022.
COP26 was a turning point for youth representatives from different countries, who for the first time were included to participate in climate change discussions at all levels. These youth representatives called on their peers to be more meaningfully engaged in the fight towards a better environmentally friendly future for all. How can we engage students in our classrooms who are not as passionate, and who may or may not care about climate change? New approaches and strategies are needed in the classroom to engage students in climate education in order to increase climate literacy. Towards this goal, a course on global climate change is created with the aim of increasing university students’ knowledge about climate change, as well as encourage them to be part of the solution to mitigate its impacts on people and resources. One particular approach used in the course are case studies that engage students in realistic scenarios that contextualize concepts. Case studies, which also encourage critical thinking, active learning, and peer interactions, can be used in various teaching modalities. This particular course is taught online asynchronous and included several activities to increase learning of major topics in climate change, including planning solutions for risk assessment and management. As a final project, students worked on a placed-based case study to understand the consequences of climate change in an urban city like New York City. The benefits of using the case studies and other approaches, learning outcomes, as well as challenges and lessons learned developing and teaching this course during the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.
How to cite: Damas, M. C.: Teaching Climate Education in an Urban University Classroom, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-321, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-321, 2022.
The Met Office Hadley Centre has a dedicated stategic area, known as Knowledge Integration, which focuses on translating and communicating science from across its research. Made up of people with expertise across both science and communications, the team works directly with scientists and a wide variety of end users to co-create tailored outputs for specific needs. These outputs synthesise information from many different programmes of work from both the Met Office, as well as from a range of partners both across the UK and internationally . This includes working with collaborators across multiple disciplines, for example taking on best practice from social science approaches to communication (and the team is also working to help contribute to that evidence base). The outputs take the form of anything from written policy briefs, to infographics, to workshops and teach-ins – with the final package of media determined by the needs and preferences of users.
While the work of the team is primarily focused at policy and decision-making audiences, they provide support to those who work directly with the media and public by sharing their work and expertise to ensure scientific rigour and credibility. Our work also feeds into a programme of education and outreach which reaches a large and diverse audience.
In this session members of the Knowledge Integration team will explain how they work with scientists and end-users to maximise the potential value and impact of research findings. We will talk about the role we play at an institutional level, how we operate, who we work with, how we learn lessons to keep learning and evolving, and how we monitor the impact of what we do.
How to cite: Williams, D., Dunbar, T., Jones, J., and MacNeill, K.: An institutional approach to translating and synthesising science for different audiences, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-665, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-665, 2022.
Citizens as voluntary weather observers have long contributed to weather and climate science. The density of the professional observation network is enriched by lay observations of weather phenomena and their impacts. Some statements about the impact of climate change on the environment and people would not be possible without them. A better public understanding is also particularly interesting in order to build up decision-relevant knowledge about climate change, as citizens not only gain key scientific insights, but also increase their understanding of the topic and gain a growing interest in the research process.
In two projects in Germany (in Brandenburg, within the FESSTVaL (Field Experiment on submesoscale spatio-temporal variability in Lindenberg) measurement campaign initiated by the Hans-Ertel-Center for Weather Research, and in Bavaria, in the KARE-Citizen Science project), we use a weather station to be assembled by pupils as a participatory vehicle to increase interest in and understanding of weather and climate, as well as of weather forecasting, and to generate high resolution data for research. The pupils measure weather data such as temperature and precipitation with self-built weather stations out of a 3D-printer. They also report weather impacts such as observed damages. These data are evaluated in workshops involving the students, their teachers, local partners and scientists. Interesting meteorological phenomena were discovered in the dataset, e.g. a cold pool that can form during a thunderstorm and trigger new ones. Thus, our network of higher spatial and temporal resolution data collected by the pupils has the potential to study these small-scale phenomena in more detail than with professional networks of about 25 km spacing.
How to cite: Schoster, D., Rust, H., Sobottke, V., Göber, M., and Kox, T.: Measuring weather data with a self-build low-cost sensor , EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-360, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-360, 2022.
The educational web portal www.klimafolgenonline-bildung.de is a tailor-made climate service to make climate and climate impact data and scientific knowledge of climate impacts and adaptation applicable for secondary and vocational schools in Germany. Climate science fundamentals and worksheets combining the interactive experience exploring climate data in the web portal with other sources have been designed for the school context to enable teachers to educate the complex relationships of climate change and its impacts [1]. In addition, as an easy-to-use compendium for the multitude and heterogeneous teaching materials, we have set up the separate web site www.klimabildung-pik.de. This site includes as well handouts, explanations and a tutorial. Here, we follow a competence-oriented approach, directed at everyday experience and the direct regional reference of students, enabling them to come to reasoned decisions.
To test and improve the developed learning lessons, to make them more self-explanatory and to tailor them for disciplinary school lessons, we performed more than 40 workshops and surveys with teachers. In secondary schools, nearly for all subjects we found entrance points for climate change learning units. In vocational schools, we developed learning units for economics, social studies, politics, healthcare management and insurance brokerage.
During the development process, we identified a number of challenges related to climate education with an interactive web portal approach (see as well [1]): the requirement to break down the scientific information when using a web portal, the usability of scientific visualizations for non-expert users, the communication of uncertainties and the integration of interactive web portals in school lessons in general. A specific observation is that in some cases the gap between the media skills of teachers and students can be a problem while interactively orienting in a complex space of climate scenarios, sectors and parameters. The additional time requirements for teachers integrating new interactive material into a rigid school curriculum and the level of attention span of some students can be further obstacles using the provided teaching material. For vocational schools, we observed much less hurdles and a higher motivation of students even without teacher support.
For future work, we plan to integrate the teaching material into our new international portal version (currently available at kfo.pik-potsdam.de), providing teaching material tailored to climate impact information as well outside of Germany and for teachers and students in other world regions.
[1] Blumenthal, I., Schlenther, C., Hirsbrunner, S., Stock, M., Nocke, T. (2018): Climate Impacts for German Schools - An Educational Web Portal Solution. - In: Filho, W. L., Manolas, E., Azul, A. M., Azeiteiro, U. M., McGhie, H. (Eds.), Handbook of Climate Change Communication: Vol. 3 - Case Studies in Climate Change Communication, Cham : Springer, 209-223.
How to cite: Hoffmann, P., Blumenthal, I., Hauf, Y., and Nocke, T.: Climate Education in conjunction with a Climate Data Web Portal: a Field Report, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-670, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-670, 2022.
Since a few years, the cooperation between public and private sector is gaining importance to make more data available.
One example for this is the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) Scheme, which uses ships (commercial and private) to acquire and transmit many meteorological and oceanographic parameters. These variables provide essential input to weather warnings and forecasts at sea and at land for more than a century. Nowadays many commercial vessels are already equipped with meteorological and oceanographic sensors to provide the shipping company with data needed for the optimization of the operations of the ship. The VOS network relies on ships sailing all oceans and seas of the world. The ships are recruited by national meteorological services (NMSs) for taking and transmitting meteorological observations. The forerunner of the VOS scheme dates back as far as 1853, when seafaring nations organised the first formal international meteorological meeting to coordinate the weather observing at sea. The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) aims at making and promoting all gathered data accessible and usable to the meteorological and scientific community as well as complementing the NMS operated VOS.
One key characteristic of the VOS network is that the ships and the observers onboard are volunteers, and not professionals. National meteorological services recruit vessels and the crew to a national VOS programme, equip them with calibrated instruments, train the observers, and provide means to code and transmit the weather observations from ship to shore, where the data provides essential input to numerical weather models, forecasts and warnings, as well as climatological applications. The reason for sailors, shipping companies and ship owners for joining the VOS scheme is the profound knowledge that mariners face many hazards while at sea: storms, rough seas, ice and icebergs, and only accurate warnings and forecasts can provide valuable information for safe routing. This important link between these observations and the chance to enhance the safety for life at sea led to the inclusion of weather observations as obligatory within the international convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS).
Despite the increasing importance of the data from the VOS scheme, the number of participants has been decreasing in the past years. To compensate this loss, efforts are made to take and generate data from other sources, such as from collaborations with scientific and commercial projects and operational networks. One key task of these efforts is to present the requirements of the operational meteorological community to other groups.
The presentation will give an overview of the VOS network, other global ocean observing networks, show examples of public-private partnerships, and will give an outlook onto the next decade of meteorological and oceanographic observations at sea including 3rd party data.
How to cite: Kleta, H.: In-situ Observations at Sea, the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) Scheme, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-13, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-13, 2022.
CLIMADA (from CLIMate ADAptation) is a free and open-source software framework for weather and climate risk modelling written in Python. It uses an event-based, probabilistic approach to integrate multiple hazards, exposure, and vulnerability into a risk assessment for impact forecasts on regional, national, and global scales. In line with the Economics of Climate Adaptation (ECA) methodology, recent versions of CLIMADA support cost-benefit analysis for climate risks in face of a warming climate. Explicitly incorporating adaptation measures and strategies, CLIMADA aims to support stakeholders and decision makers in handling climate-related impacts on infrastructure, societies, and ecosystems.
Although CLIMADA is a primarily scientific tool, it is easy to learn and use. CLIMADA offers numerous tutorials with step-by-step guidance provided as Jupyter Notebooks. These and the extensive documentation are written for both Python beginners and advanced users. For quick and intuitive visual feedback of results, CLIMADA offers pre-defined plotting functions generating forecast and impact maps. Combining open-source software with open data, it allows users to explore and assess the numerous facets of climate risk. Recent versions of CLIMADA include a data API which automatically downloads required data like storm tracks and exposed assets. The available data on a global scale serves as a demonstration, and users can always read in custom datasets reflecting their particular use case. The combination of these features makes CLIMADA an efficient toolset for both research and education.
In this contribution we will present CLIMADA and demonstrate its capabilities. We invite participants to join the session interactively and will provide ready-to-use examples and exercises.
How to cite: Riedel, L., Kam, P. M., Röösli, T., Kropf, C., and Bresch, D. N.: CLIMADA: A beginner-friendly tool for weather and climate risk assessment, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-445, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-445, 2022.
