ANNUAL SESSION AGENDA: DAY 4

Significant efforts have been made to improve weather and climate services in South Asia mostly through national investments. These have been essential to build the capability to exploit scientific and technological advances to deliver a wide range of services demanded by users. However, these demands are growing as the weather and climate impacts societies more and as scientific and technical knowhow increases. This has reached a point where the capacity of countries to produce these services is no longer possible if they continue to act alone. While data and information sharing has always been a hallmark of meteorological services, the volume of data and the technical knowledge to interpret information is a limiting factor in the performance of many national meteorological services. Observational networks, computing resources and technical skills are shared needs of all countries. South Asia regional investment in shared facilities would provide a cost-effective means to exploit the best science and technology and complement continuing national investments focused on tailoring services to a country’s specific needs. This has been well demonstrated in Europe through organizations such as ECMWF, EUMETSAT and EUMETNET. By pooling resources, all countries have equal access to very high level of shared skills that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or unavailable.

This session considers the opportunities (and obstacles) for regional investments in weather and climate infrastructure that would have the potential to increase significantly the value of direct investments in national meteorological services.