Michel Béland
Environment Canada
Contact: michel.beland@ec.gc.ca
This document was prepared by scientists from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)-World Weather Research Programme (WWRP), World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), and the natural-hazards and socioeconomic communities. It is intended to inform policy makers, national academies of science and users of weather, climate and environmental information of the urgent necessity for establishing a /Weather, Climate and Earth-System Prediction Project/ to increase the capacity of disaster-risk reduction managers and environmental policy makers to make sound decisions to minimize and adapt to the societal, economic and environmental vulnerabilities arising from high-impact weather and climate.
This endeavor is comparable in scale to the Apollo Moon Project, International Space Station, Genome Project and Hubble Telescope, with a socioeconomic and environmental benefits-to-cost ratio that is much higher. It will provide the capacity to realize the full benefits from the observational, modeling, prediction and early-warning system components of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and to accelerate major advances in weather, climate and Earth-system prediction and the use of this information by global societies. Delivering the benefits from this ambitious endeavor will require building upon the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) as an international organizational framework to coordinate the proposed/ Project/ across the weather, climate, Earth-system, natural-hazards and socioeconomic disciplines. Moreover, it will require investments in: i) maintaining existing and developing new observational capabilities; ii) advanced high-performance computing facilities with eventual sustained speeds of more than 10,000 times that of the most advanced computers of today, linked to a network of research and operational-forecast centers and early-warning systems world wide; iii) education, science and technology transfer projects to enhance the awareness and utilization of weather, climate, environmental and socioeconomic information; iv) infrastructure to transition/ Project/ research achievements into operational products and services.