One week in Munich: inspirations for the polar regions from the SERA-WG meeting & HIWeather final conference

The bi-annual physical meeting of the Societal and Economic Research Applications Working Group (SERA-WG) of the WMO World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) was held (8-10 September 2024) in conjunction with the final conference (9-13 September 2024) of the High Impact Weather project in Munich, Germany. PCAPS steering group members Jelmer Jeuring (MET Norway) and Machiel Lamers (Wageningen University & Research) are part of SERA-WG and participated in these events.

The SERA-WG is a varied group of people representing different social sciences and countries from across the world, tasked with overseeing the relevance and promoting the role of the social sciences in the activities and projects of WMO’s WWRP.

Having two PCAPS Steering Group members in the SERA-WG helps to identify and deliver important research insights, updates on activities as well as guidance from SERA-WG and other WWRP projects (such as PEOPLE, SAGE or InPHRA) to PCAPS and vice versa. Since PCAPS builds on the Polar Prediction Project it has been able to make a running start, and in some ways it is running slightly ahead of the other current WWRP projects. Several SERA-WG members already have committed to steering committees of the other WWRP projects, which will allow the SERA-WG to fulfil a role as one of the bridges between the new WWRP projects. 

The SERA Working Group. From left to right: Machiel Lamers, Nekeisha Spencer, Gilbert Siame, Isadora Jimenez, Julio Postigo, Jelmer Jeuring, Carla Mooney, Don Nelson, Isha Bhasin, Bowen Zou, Everisto Mapedza. Credit: Isha Bhasin

One of the key tasks on the agenda of the SERA-WG last week was to re-assess its mission and construct a prioritised list of activities for the next 3 years. For example, it was decided to work on a publication that will scope the enabling and constraining factors for transdisciplinary research in the development of early warning systems.

In the context of PCAPS this includes close collaborations with the maritime sector, Indigenous and local communities, and the tourism sector, to name a few.

The SERA-WG also decided to organise the next online Weather & Society Conference in early 2026. This will be the third conference of its kind. The two previous versions were held in 2022 and 2024, and have proven to be an important platform for staging societally relevant research that align with several of the planned PCAPS activities. 

The SERA-WG meeting was organised in conjunction with the final conference of the High Impact Weather project (HIWeather). As part of the previous WWRP implementation plan, the project has been running for ten years and concludes in 2024.

The project has focused on the challenges of making forecasts and warnings more effective in saving lives and reducing damage and disruption from weather-related hazards.

The conference took place over five full days and covered a range of themes, including the understanding and prediction of hazards, human impacts and vulnerability, communication, citizen science, impact-based forecasting and warning, and evaluations of warning value chains.

With polar climates changing rapidly and weather conditions at high latitudes becoming more variable and extreme, systematic knowledge of societal impacts of hazardous conditions across the Antarctic and Arctic regions, as well as tailored-to-context warning information is more relevant than ever.

PCAPS will take the insights from the HIWeather project into the polar context. Overall, these meetings show how prominent the integration of social and natural sciences, as well as the inclusion of and interaction with societal actors has become in the approach of the WWRP.