“Climate Services for the Twenty-First Century” Technical Conference, and 13th Session of the WMO Commission of Climatology

The “Climate Services for the Twenty-First Century” Technical Conference was held in the WMO headquarters in Geneva on November 19-20, 2001. The Conference was intended to provide some guidance to the Commission of Climatology (CCl) which took place just afterwards. It was divided into four sessions, dealing with:

• basic activities, such as climate monitoring, data management, access to data,
• applied climate research,
• the impacts of a changing world (climate change; globalization, i.e. a more interconnected world; technological advances) on the need for climate services, and on requests to climate services, and
• perspectives in terms of information services and climatological predictions.

The conference was chaired by Peter Lamb (University of Oklahoma), and attended by 116 participants, in addition to speakers and WMO representatives.

An address entitled “Climate and the urban environment” was delivered by Tim Oke (University of British Columbia). In his presentation, he reviewed the difficulty of making climatological measurements in urban environments, i.e. how define “good sites” for different variables, how representative are they, which instruments and exposures have to be used, what about the inevitable urban site changes over time, and how long term observations can be used in order to derive global changes. He expressed the need (i) for specific but flexible guidelines for siting, in connection with the Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation (CIMO), based on ongoing research, e.g. modeling of the urban environment (ii) for regularly updated metadata (at least every 2 years) and standardized metadata formats (iii) to pay special attention to measurements in the urban-rural fringe, which are subject to rapid changes in their environment. He stressed the breadth of the community that uses urban climate data: city and building designers, transport/communications, air quality and its relationships to health, water engineering and management, the energy and insurance sectors, and the capabilities of new tools such as local models which open the door to the accurate description and forecasting of urban atmospheric conditions. This will allow new services in the domain of e.g. the safety of workers, or crane operations.

The conference ended with two awards given to:

• Prof. N.V. Kobysheva (Russian Federation), for “outstanding services to WMO and particularly to CCl, in recognition of her outstanding contribution in urban climatology, particularly in providing guidance material for building design and technology, both within CCl and the academic environment”
• Prof. T. Oke and Dr. J. Maunder (Canada), for “outstanding contribution in, and promotion of, Urban Building Climatology in the educational field”.

During the CCl, a specific agenda item was devoted to urban climatology. The Commission noted the increasing urbanization occurring worldwide, the associated impacts on populations and environment, and the related potential implications of climate variability and climate change. Projections show that nearly all the population growth expected during the next thirty years (+ 2 billion persons) will be concentrated in urban areas, especially in developing countries located in tropical and subtropical areas.
The Commission:

• recommended that guidelines for implementing meteorological and climatological measurements in urban areas should be added to the WMO Guide of Instruments and Methods of Observation
• emphasized the need to enhance the CCl web site by including a section on urban climatology
• endorsed the initiative of the president of CCl to build awareness of the relationship between human habitat and climate, and the proposal that regional conferences should be held in cooperation with UNHCS
• commended the preparation of a curriculum and background material for specialized studies in the field of Urban and Building Climatology, at the request of the WMO Education and Training Programme
• noted the importance of increasing research on both high latitude and tropical urban environments, and of identifying appropriate mechanisms to fully implement the Tropical Urban Climate Experiment (TRUCE).

Pierre Bessemoulin
Météo-France
Head of Climatology Department and Representative of the IAUC to the WMO Technical Conference and the 13th Meeting of the WMO Commission for Climatology