The two pilots aim to increase preparedness and resilience of transportation and tourism sectors to inter-annual climate variability through user-oriented climate services that provide tailored forecast products for various timescales (short-range, sub-seasonal and seasonal scale). The pilot will generate:

• tailored sub-seasonal and seasonal climate outlooks for Finland focusing on winter weather conditions, including onset and offset of winter tire season, freezing temperature and snow conditions
• sub-seasonal (3-month) climate outlooks and 4-days forecasts of climate-tourism indicators for 20 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Greece

The sub-seasonal outlooks for Finland are available for the users on the FMI Ilmanet platform, while the seasonal climate outlooks on the seasonal.fmi.fi web-portal. The operational service for production and dissemination of sub-seasonal outlooks was launched in September 2020 with the winter tire season outlook, the other outlooks were added in December 2020. The production and dissemination of seasonal climate outlooks is operational since January 2021. The service is iterated with the user during the pilot seasons and improved progressively. Availability: internal and for the users.

The e-shape service CRITERION is based on Copernicus ERA5 data for climatological information, the Copernicus C3S 50-member ensemble for the seasonal forecasting and on WRF local scale weather forecasts at 4×4 km over Greece. Detailed information is provided at 20 UNESCO cultural heritage monuments in Greece in the form of simple symbols and charts. The service has been developed by the Research Center for Atmospheric Physics and Climatology at the Academy of Athens and is available online since April 2021 at https://unesco-weather.gr/.

Nature of the outcome:

The outcomes of the pilots:

• Maps of sub-seasonal and seasonal forecast products: weekly (static maps and their animation) and monthly maps, in addition a short description of the forecast product and its definitions, information on the computation of the product and advice on how to interpret the forecast is provided for each forecast product. The climate outlooks produced are winter tire season (sub-seasonal), probability of snow cover (sub-seasonal and seasonal), snow depth (sub-seasonal) and probability of freezing temperature (sub-seasonal and seasonal).
• Graphs of 4-day and seasonal forecasts, including information on air temperature, precipitation, wind and relative humidity at selected cultural heritage monuments in Greece.

• The sub-seasonal outlooks are developed and operationally running on the FMI server and released on the FMI Ilmanet platform (http://ilmanet.fi), accessible using credentials. The seasonal climate outlooks are produced operationally on the WEkEO DIAS platform and disseminated to the users through the seasonal.fmi.fi web-portal.
• The touristic service for Greece (CRITERION) is developed and operationally running on the supercomputing cluster of the Research Center for Atmospheric Physics and Climatology, at the Academy of Athens. The service is available on https://unesco-weather.gr/.

Web based application

The developed climate services serve tire companies with beneficial sub-seasonal and seasonal forecast information and the tourism sector with short-range and seasonal forecast information, increasing their climate resilience and raising awareness to adopt more sustainable ways. The services developed helps user in decision making and planning their activities increasing the users’ competitiveness and economical benefit. In addition, the services developed increase the transportation safety (in Finland) and serves the public in planning and organizing their touristic activities (in Greece).

• Assessing the quality and applicability of sub-seasonal and seasonal climate forecast products over various regions (Finland and Greece).
• Demonstration of added value of sub-seasonal and seasonal forecast products for transportation and tourism users for planning and decision making.

The seasonal forecast data and re-analysis data used in the pilot are available from C3S CDS, the sub-seasonal forecast data used is available from ECMWF for national meteorological services of ECMWF member and cooperating states. The maps provided by the FMI service are available for the users.

The codes can be made available on GitHub after the service is finalized.

For FMI products not scheduled yet, the CRITERION application is planned to be registered in the GEO/GEOSS catalogue once it's fully developed.