Dr. Jorge Tamayo Carmona, Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET)
The cooperation between Iberoamerican National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) it is coordinated through the Conference of Directors of Iberoamerican NMHS (CIMHET), who takes advantage of the unique framework that provides the cultural and idiomatic heritage in the region. It is constituted by all 21 NMHSs of Iberoamerica, including Spain and Portugal. CIMHET provides a forum for dialogue between Iberoamerican NMHSs, recognized by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as an example of cooperation and operability.
The Conference approves at its annual meetings, from 2003, the strategic lines to be developed by the Iberoamerican Meteorological Cooperation Program (IMCP), carried out with the collaboration of WMO and funded mostly by a trust fund established by Spain in this organization.
The IMCP acts mostly in regional and subregional activities, with three strategic lines approved by CIMHET for the 2018-20 period: Institutional strengthening and resource mobilization; provision of meteorological, climatic and hydrological services; education and training
For this period there are scheduled more than 15 training courses, covering topics like climate change, droughts monitoring and forecasting, agrometeorology, operational forecasting, air quality, maritime and aeronautical meteorology, meteorological instrumentation or NMHS management. From the beginning of the program, there were given more than 60 courses and workshops on several meteorological and climate topics with more than 1200 students.
Among the activities recently launched, it highlights the implementation of a Central America Lightning Detection Network and the development of Downscalig Central America Climate Change Scenarios.
The first of these projects is funded by means of LAIF Program of EU and is currently being implemented. It is a clear example of a collaborative project among the NMHSs of the region, with sensors distributed by all the countries, a single processor system and exploitation systems in each NMHS. This structure allows a quite good spatial resolution for meteorological purposes (better than 100m in mostly of the area) and a high detection capability with a much lower cost than for 6 national networks. In addition, it has been possible to take advantage of existing infrastructure, such as the Honduran lighting detection network. This regional system will be part of the future Central America Virtual Warning Center for Adverse Hydrometeorolgical Phenomena.
The second project, which has not only been proposed by CIMHET but also by the Conference of Iberoamerican Directors of Water (CODIA) and the Iberoamerican Network of Climate Change Offices (RIOCC), it will be funded by the Program EUROCLIMA+ from EU. In the project, which has the participation of all the services of the region, also will be involved the CRRH-SICA (Regional Committee for Hydraulic Resources) to host the system to made available to user the results. It is planned to recover the necessary data to make an appropriate downscaling of climate change scenarios. Finally, it is expected to involve at users to define the different interest products to facilitate climate change effects adaptation measures and policies.
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