2013-News
12th December 2013: IC3 is organizing a workshop on ‘Prospects for Arctic sea ice and climate predictions’. This workshop is intended for the scientific community and it will take place in Barcelona at IC3 headquarters.
13-16 November 2013: The Training on Long-Range Forecast (LRF Training) session took place preceding the First Session of the Mediterranean Climate Outlook Forum (MedCOF-1) in Belgrade (Serbia). The training is intended for climate experts of the different European meteorological services. Scientists from SPECS partners (ECMWF, Meteo-France, IC3) have been invited as experts to give training talks.
13-14 November 2013: The workshop “Introduction to forecast verification using R” was organized by IC3 and lead by Stefan Siegert (University of Exeter) took place in Barcelona. This workshop aimed to review state-of-the-art methods for the evaluation and comparison of ensemble forecasts and probability forecasts and more specifically on reliability (a.k.a. calibration) as an important property of such forecasts.
30-31 October 2013: Prof. Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes was invited by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) to give a talk about decadal prediction and SPECS at the “International Symposium on New Faces of Climate Variability” in Tokyo (Japan). The symposium is arranged to provide a platform to discuss recent progress in climate variability and predictability in the context of past and present discoveries.
23-25 October 2013: The Belmont Forum organized the “International Call Scoping Workshop" in Goa (India) to co-define research priorities on societal issues related to seasonal-to-decadal variability of regional climate, ranging from monsoons to the polar regions. This international forum has brought together leading climate science and stakeholders to discuss and define research priorities. The coordinator of the SPECS project, Prof. Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes, has been invited by the European Commission as scientific expert and gave an introductory talk to SPECS.
18th October 2013: The first European Climate Observations, Modelling and Services (ECOMS) newsletter has been launched in November 2013. The ECOMS initiative was formed in June 2012 to ensure close coordination and cooperation across European Commission-funded climate modelling and climate services projects and to act as an advisory group/think tank to identify priorities and research and investment needs in the field of climate modelling and services. ECOMS is promoted by the European Commission and led by three European projects (NACLIM, SPECS and EUPORIAS). It includes representatives of all the other active European projects on climate modelling (EUCLIPSE, EMBRACE, COMBINE, IMPACT2C), climate services (ECLISE, CLIM-RUN) and infrastructure (IS-ENES2), as well as major European climate modelling and climate service centres.
15-17 October 2013: The Second General Assembly of SPECS took place in De Bilt (The Netherlands). After one year from the beginning of the project the meeting had a good turnout, including affiliated partners from Europe and North America.
