Achieving Valuable Weather and Climate Services

Weather and climate services rely on the production and delivery of relevant, credible and, of course, valuable information. In this sense, the energy industry, with its long-standing and varied needs for these services and strong experience, provides a solid test bed for assessing these services. However, it is argued here that, whether for public or commercial use, weather and climate services are, in essence, no different to other more familiar services (e.g. financial). For weather and especially the more recent climate services to succeed, it is therefore important that lessons from these other common services—which also often deal with uncertain and complex information—are considered. It is also natural and important that the burgeoning climate services learn from the more mature and analogous weather services in order to leapfrog development. Initial public investment is critical to spur development of these services. Such investment should then be phased out in a managed way to avoid abruptly interrupting their growth phase and therefore jeopardising their sustainability, given the strong effort that is also being invested into developing these services. The criticalities of the weather and climate services—such as the accuracy and skill of the information—need to be borne in mind when modulating public investment.