The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced an investment of nearly A$$1m (US$690,000) in a gridded renewable energy nowcasting demonstration project, with Sydney-based company Solcast.
Solcast said its aim is to enhance existing weather forecast services by developing a proof-of-concept demonstration of a forecasting tool that will track and predict renewable output in real time. The goal is to predict up to six hours ahead in five-minute increments, distributed into 1-2km grids across South Australia (SA).
The company stated that the 12-month project will deliver more frequently updated, high-resolution weather forecasts specifically designed for the Australian energy industry.
The Mars 2020 mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. In order to obtain data from the surface from the Red Planet, NASA has selected partners to provide measurement instruments for installation on the Mars Perseverance rover. One of these is a Spanish-led European consortium that supplies the rover with its Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) – a set of sensors that record measurements of temperature, windspeed and direction, pressure, relative humidity, and the amount and size of dust particles.
The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), part of the consortium, has supplied instrumentation based on Finnish specialist Vaisala’s sensors, to MEDA for the measurement of humidity and pressure.
Belgrade, capital of Serbia, is due to have its flood warning systems overhauled and modernized. In May 2014, the city suffered substantial flood damage, which spurred authorities, in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program (UNPD), to increase its resilience to natural disaster. Part of the plan to achieve this is the implementation of a flood monitoring and warning system.
Italian firm CAE, in consortium with a Serbian organization, won the tender to supply instrumentation for the project. This will include 34 standalone rain gauge stations (seven of which will be equipped with heated gauges), 22 hydrometric stations and 3 UHF repeaters.
The World Meteorological Organization has developed a set of e-learning resources to support the dissemination of extreme weather warnings.
The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is a data format for exchanging public warnings of hazards such as floods, landslides, tropical cyclones, strong winds, drought and heat waves. It enables automated transmission of warnings over most communication platforms in order to better reach all parties in need of such information.
The CAP standard is also an important component of the WMO Global Multi-hazard Alert System (GMAS), a platform that the organization is developing for collecting and displaying all warnings issued by authorized sources, on a real-time basis.
Continue reading New meteorological e-learning from WMO at Meteorological Technology International.
A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) committee of experts has established two new world records for the longest reported distance and the longest reported duration for a single lightning flash in, respectively, Brazil and Argentina.
The new records for ‘megaflashes’, which have been verified with new satellite lightning imagery technology, more than double the previous values measured in the USA and France. The findings were published by the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.
WMO’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes, which maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes found that:
The World Meteorological Organization reported that it is seeking to verify a new record temperature north of the Arctic Circle of 38°C. This was recorded on June 20 in the Russian town of Verkhoyansk, against the setting of a prolonged Siberian heatwave and increase in wildfire activity.
The WMO noted that Verkhoyansk, located in the northern part of Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), is in a region of Eastern Siberia which has an extreme very harsh dry continental climate (very cold winter and hot summer).
The Verkhoyansk meteorological station had a previous air temperature record of 37.3°C observed on July 25, 1988, according to scientists German Alekseenkov and Vasily Smolyanitsky at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorological and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet).
Global surface temperatures for the first five months of the year were the second highest on record, marginally behind the strong El Niño year of 2016, reports the WMO. Significantly, last month was the warmest May on record, according to US and European data sets.
NOAA, which reports monthly climatological data from observing sites, said that May global temperatures tied with 2016. It was the 44thth consecutive May and the 425th consecutive month with temperatures above – at least nominally – the 20th century average. The seven warmest Mays have all occurred in the past seven years.
Meanwhile, analysis by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information shows that 2020 is likely (>99.9%) to rank among the five warmest years on record.
After a month’s absence, on June 17 the German research icebreaker Polarstern rendezvoused with the Arctic MOSAiC floe at 82.2° North and 8.4° East, after having previously left it on May 19, 2020, to exchange personnel and bunker supplies near Svalbard.
The location of Polarstern’s return destination was never in doubt: autonomous monitoring stations transmit positioning data from the drifting floe at regular intervals. During the absence of personnel, the station continued to automatically gather data, such as energy balances (energy transfers between the atmosphere, ice and ocean) and more, ensuring that fundamental parameters could still be monitored while the researchers were away.
