16 short courses, over 1,000 participants

Since autumn 2020, a series of short courses on data discovery for weather, oceanography, air quality and climate has been successfully running. In 2021 more than 1,000 participants from around the world had the opportunity to interact with experts from EUMETSAT and partnering organisations, such as the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), the German National Meteorological Service (DWD), MeteoSwiss, ECMWF and the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA), among others.

Each course was recorded and is openly accessible to the public from the EUMETSAT training page, where new courses are also listed.

CALMet XIV Conference - Bringing Together the Best of Online to Learning

The CALMet XIV Conference, with the theme Bringing Together the Best of Online to Learning, was hosted by Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, Argentina, on 27 September-1 October 2021 - fully online.

The conference brought together 260 educators, trainers and managers from universities, research institutions, and National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, providing an opportunity for a world-wide community to collaborate and network on workforce development, in support of the global weather, water and climate industry.

Being online meant that for the first time the conference was accessible to many experts who in the past have not had the opportunity to attend. This resulted in 70% new participants in the conference, with good promotion and new awareness of CALMet. For the newcomers it was good to see there is a larger global trainer community that can help. Particularly noteworthy was the South American participation, thanks to active promotion by RTC Argentina and Spanish translations offered by WMO and number of participants from ongoing WMO Train the Trainer course for Spanish-speaking instructors joining the sessions.

The online conference environment was graciously offered by the WMO ETR office, and all the resources of the event are available on the ETRP Moodle site.

Supporting Marine EO Educators: professional development, knowledge exchange and networking workshop

In September, EUMETSAT, IODE and CMEMS ran the Supporting Marine EO Educators workshop. This interactive event brought together educators from around the world to share knowledge, skills, resources and code related to training in Earth Observation. The course was composed of self-paced learning through the Moodle page, along with virtual live sessions.

There was a mix of teaching experience across the group, with some attendees preparing for their first training courses and others looking for ways to enhance current teaching approaches. A round table session was held during the final week which was incredibly collaborative with attendees and trainers all sharing their personal experiences, thoughts, and challenges.

During the three weeks, participants worked on creating their own artifacts, which ranged from Juypter Notebooks in different languages to course plans including activities and exercises to be completed by the students - The image above is a snapshot from Clued-eo game created by Emma Sullivan (PML).

Training School & Workshop on Dust Aerosol Detection and Monitoring

The training school and workshop closed its last practical session on 24 November. The school had more than 200 participants across four days of open webinars on the basics of aerosol and dust and on the principles of observations, modelling and forecasting, followed by data discovery sessions. The workshop engaged about 50 selected participants who took part in three days of practical exercises and assignments on different types of data for dust monitoring and prediction. Participants worked in small groups, together with a trainer, on guided exercises during daily two-hour sessions.

The course provided an awareness of state-of-the-art satellite-based, ground-based, and model-based products for aerosol detection and monitoring, as well as offering opportunities to learn about the applicability and effectiveness of the respective products. It was jointly organised by EUMETSAT and the WMO SDS-WAS Regional Center (which is managed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, BSC, and the Spanish Meteorological State Agency, (AEMET) with the support of Copernicus and ACTRIS programmes.

Recordings of all the webinars with data discovery sessions, including presentations, are available on the EUMETSAT Training website.

A second edition of the school will run next year:

• 24-30 January 2022: Phase I – Webinars
• 31 January-4 February 2022: Phase II – Practical workshop.

More details to come.

HSAF Event Week on Snow

The H SAF Snow Event Week was held in collaboration with EUMeTrain from 22 to 26 November 2021. The main aim of the event week was to introduce the H SAF snow products and get the forecasters, researchers and modellers familiarised with them for their everyday applications.

During the week, 16 presentations were held by 12 presenters, working for H SAF from Italy, Turkey and Finland. The event week started with the introduction of the H SAF as a satellite application facility, its work, and the products available. Later in the week several, practical presentations were held — including a presentation on Jupyter Notebooks, where participants got a chance to see how the notebooks were used to manipulate satellite data to create different products. All the material has been opened to the participants and they could have checked the GitHub repository where the SAF is storing their work.

In total, 46 people participated in the event week listening-in from 21 countries, across three continents. The event week was held and the presentations were recorded using the Webex system. The recordings will become available to a wider audience at the beginning of December on http://www.eumetrain.org.

7th SALGEE Workshop

SALGEE (Satellite Applications in Land surface analyses Group for Eastern Europe) is a EUMETSAT project initiative of the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology of Bulgaria (NIMH), which started in 2009.

Every two years, SALGEE organises an onsite workshop, gathering experts and users together to share experiences on the use of satellite products for monitoring the land surface state: vegetation condition, water stress and wild fires. This year, for the first time, the SALGEE workshop was held online via Zoom, which did not prevent as much vibrant discussion between participants. To facilitate further exchange of knowledge a Wonder.me virtual room was made available, where participants were invited to meet in groups or have private chats, to give the sense of an onsite environment.

The three-day workshop focused on the combined use of satellite products from the EUMETSAT LSA SAF, CM SAF and H SAF. It enabled products developers to gather feedback and recommendations for future developments from users, who in turn could collect new ideas for applications in their regions of interest. It also raised ideas for further collaboration among participants, which will be presented at the next workshop in two years’ time.

Recordings of all presentations are on Youtube.

International Summer School 2021

The International Summer School, held online, provided an in-depth explanation of methods and techniques used to extract information from environmental satellite data, with emphasis on the latest measuring technologies and newest channels.

For the first time, the school offered three-in-one learning, as three different analysis and visualisation tools were introduced: McIDAS-V (installed locally), Jupyter Notebooks, and SIFT (run in a EUMETSAT virtual environment using virtual machines).

Fifteen participants from more than 10 countries (mostly European) participated in the course, which made it possible to include practical sessions with hands-on work on the data in small groups with intense facilitation from the trainers.

The next summer school is planned for Q2 2022.

South-East Europe Meteorological Training Course (SEEMET) 2021

The South-Eastern Europe Meteorological (SEEMET) 2021 training course was held online, hosted by Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ), and supported by EUMETSAT and EUMETCAL.

It was the sixth in the series of courses that aim to regularly train operational staff of the Eastern European Meteorological and Hydrological Services. Twenty-three participants from 11 countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Slovenia) joined.

The course was focused on the analysis and forecasting of winter weather conditions and forecasting challenges involved. Special emphasis was put on the use of satellite data and products.

The course was designed to improve the skills of operational meteorologists in interpretating satellite images and products, in combination with other relevant data, leading to improved competencies in forecasting winter weather. The course aimed to contribute to improving the capabilities of the NHMSs in South Eastern Europe in providing weather and warning services to national stakeholders and communities.

According to the evaluation, the course met the expectations — participants were motivated to learn, they actively participated in the discussions, and they plan to apply what they learned in their everyday work.