The co-sponsered WMO – Météo-France course addressed the current state-of-the-art techniques in climate variability and changes while providing practical climatologic training. It also highlighted the numerous aspects that NHMSs need to address urgently in order to comply with modern climate services such as climate data quality and management, data rescue, seasonal forecasting and the use of climate products and indices.
The courses were structured to cover:
- Climate Systems and Applications - Climate Variability, Climate Change, future scenarios, Agriculture Meteorology, Hydrology, Drought;
- Climate Analysis tools - Modeling, Downscaling, Reanalysis, Climate Indices, Seasonal Forecasting; and
- Operational Climatology - Missions and challenges for a climatology unit, Availability and dissemination of data, Data rescue, Data products, Inter-operability, Data homogenization, Metadata, Data capturing, Quality Control, Data generation, Data merging.
The course attracted 18 participants from NMHSs in various part of the world, including Bangladesh, Barbados, Bulgaria, Estonia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, FYR of Macedonia, Philippines, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Asked to evaluate and recommend improvements to the courses, the overall assessment of trainees was that the courses were excellent and complete. However, the participants suggested adding more practical sessions such as on the topic of downscaling.
