REPORT Steering Committee Meeting of the Phase II of SEE-MHEWS-A Project 12 June 2020 1. INTRODUCTION Following the successful conclusion of the project “Building Resilience to Disasters in the Western Balkans and Turkey” in 2014, and responding to the needs identified by the beneficiaries the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in cooperation with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) initiated a project “South-East European Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory System (SEE-MHEWS-A)”, which aims to strengthen existing early warning capacities in the South- East Europe region. During the first phase of the project, an Implementation Plan was prepared outlining the concept and guidelines for the development of the regional advisory system. The second phase of the SEE-MHEWS-A project commenced in February 2018 and is supported by the World Bank through the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and Instrument for Pre- Accession Assistance (IPA) of the European Commission. This project phase will be the beginning of implementation of the SEE-MHEWS-A, as broadly outlined in the Implementation Plan. The fourth Project Steering Committee (PSC) meeting of the second phase of the project was organized as a teleconference on 12th June 2020. The meeting aimed to discuss the current status and plans for implementation of the project. The meeting was attended by 62 participants from project partners, stakeholders and WMO Secretariat (participant list is attached as Annex I). The agenda of the meeting is included as Annex II. The meeting was opened by Michael Staudinger (President of RA VI, Director of Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) and Chair of Project Steering Committee (PSC)), Florence Rabier, (Director-General, ECMWF), Eric Petermann, (Executive Director, EUMETNET), Daniel Kull (Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist, World Bank) and Milan Dacić (WMO Representative for Europe and SEE-MHEWS-A Project Executive). 2. ORGANIZATION OF THE MEETING 2.1 Project Progress, Planning and Implementation Sari Lappi (Project Coordinator, WMO) and Milan Dacić (WMO Representative for Europe and SEE- MHEWS-A Project Executive) The progress since the previous Steering Committee meeting in November 2019 has generally been efficient for all the project components, regardless of the difficulties resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of 2019, ECMWF and ZAMG were formally engaged by the World Bank in implementation of project, with ECMWF supporting implementation of all project components. Majority of the project activities are expected to be finalized before the end of 2020, but extension is needed for some of the planned activities (agreement with the World Bank needed). Policy on the Exchange of Hydrological and Meteorological Data, Information, Forecasts and Advisories under the South-East European Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory System has been signed by all project participants except Meteorological and Hydrological Services of Turkey, Technical Assistance to the current phase of the SEE-MHEWS-A project is provided with financial support from the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the European Union, the latter under the EU-WB/GFDRR Western Balkans DRM Program managed by the World Bank and GFDRR. The initial phase of the project was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. Lebanon and Bulgaria (Albania and Cyprus signed after the previous Project Steering Committee meeting). Following the Policy, Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ) and ECMWF experts have been supporting the project participants in provision of additional meteorological observations to the Centralized Observational Database (CODB), which is based on SAPP, the operational acquisition and pre-processing system of ECMWF. Meteorological and hydrological data has also been collected and processed for hydrological modelling and nowcasting purposes. Meteorological observation requirements for the SEE-MHEWS-A and assessment of availability of observations in the region were developed by the OMSZ, with draft report provided to the WMO project management team. Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO), Hellenic National Meteorological Service (HNMS), Israel Meteorological Service (IMS) and University of Belgrade continued the design of the limited-area NWP modelling systems (ALADIN, COSMO, ICON and NMM-B) and testing at ECMWF’s infrastructure and in ecFlow supervision system. Croatian Meteorological and Hydrological Service (DHMZ) applied the developed verification methodology to the Vrbas River catchment. Setting up and calibration of hydrological models (Lisflood and HBV), as well as setting up the INCA Nowcasting system were started for the Vrbas catchment. Following project activities are planned to be implemented during the next period: - Organization of regular submission of additional data by all SEE-MHEWS-A Data Policy signatories. Further signatures to the Policy if possible. - Quasi-operational running of LAMs, and connection to hydrological models and nowcasting system. - Preparation of meteorological verification report targeting each project participant country (depending data and NWP output availability). - Finalization of hydrological model calibration and setup of the system, and long-term running and production of flood forecasts for Vrbas River catchment. - Finalization of implementation of INCA for Vrbas River catchment. - Development of pilot Common Information Platform (CIP), and visualization of project outputs. - Training of hydrological forecasters (decision needed if physical workshop is possible). - Planning and fundraising for further project phases. 2.2 Infrastructure developments in WMO - GBON process and Data Policy Anthony Rea (Director, Infrastructure Department, WMO) Global Numerical Weather Prediction requires continuous, real-time access to observations from the entire global domain. Currently there are challenges in the global coverage of observations, which limits the ability to understand and predict weather and climate patterns, both locally and globally. The lack of data can be related to data policy issues, technical capabilities or inadequate financial resources. Global Basic Observing Network (GBON) is a Congress-approved WMO policy initiative that will help to improve the data availability globally. GBON reflects the fundamental recommitment of WMO Members to international data exchange in support of Global NWP as a basis for all weather and climate related products and services. Currently, the GBON regulatory material is in final drafting, and is planned to be approved by the Executive Council in September 2020. The regulatory material will specify the obligation of WMO Members to acquire and exchange certain observations at set minimum horizontal resolution and minimum frequency. The actual implementation of GBON within all WMO Members will require a mix of policy-level, 2 technical and financial intervention, depending on the respective Member in question. The Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF) is a concept for a unified financial mechanism that can fund the GBON in those areas where the local resources are (and will likely remain) insufficient, based on the principle that the burden of financing a global public good should fall to those who have the ability to shoulder it. 2.3 SEE-MHEWS-A Project Component 2 activities: Numerical weather prediction and nowcasting Jure Jerman (Head of Division for Meteorological, Hydrological and Oceanographic Modelling, ARSO), Andreadis Theodore (Researcher - Forecasting (NWP) and Research Division, HNMS), Pavel Khain (Head of Numerical Modelling, IMS), Vladimir Djurdjević (Associate Professor, University of Belgrade), Kristian Horvath (Head of Applied Research and Modelling Department, DHMZ), Bojan Kašić (Analyst, ECMWF) and Jasmina Hadzimustafić (Scientist, ZAMG). NWP teams engaged in the SEE-MHEWS project activities have been actively working on testing and implementing LAM models at ECWWF infrastructure for the project purposes. The models are in the process of being set-up in the ecFlow for quasi-operational running utilizing the computing resources of the ECMWF members from the project region. ECMWF is supporting NWP groups with installation, optimisation, and running of their models (e.g. ALADIN, COSMO, ICON, NMM-B) in ECMWF’s computing environment. ARSO is setting-up the ALADIN deterministic system in ecFlow at 2.5 km resolution, with two runs per day (depending of computing allocations). Currently ARSO is tuning and validating the system, with the aim to begin the production in June. In addition, the project will benefit from the A-LAEF ensemble system (by RC LACE), which is already running at ECMWF. COSMO is run at ECMWF twice a day with 4 km resolution for a domain that covers most to the SEE- MHEWS-A region. The outputs of these runs are available for the SEE-MHEWS-A project purposes by the HNMS. NMM-B model, including the pre-processor and post-processor have been successfully implemented by the University of Belgrade at ECMWF and is ready for quasi-operational running as soon as computing resources will be secured. MeteoSwiss has indicated the possibility of donating computing resources for the project for 2020-21, which would allow quasi-operational running of NMM-B. In the meanwhile, IMS donated resources for test running of NMM-B. The suite for running ICON-LAM was prepared at ECMWF by the Israel IMS for 2.5 km