Science and innovation are at the heart of the WMO strategy for improving national capacity to face weather hazards in a changing climate and to provide better weather- and climate-related services to all citizens worldwide. The WMO World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) aims to expand the frontier of weather science by exploring new predictive capabilities, connecting weather and climate communities, and improving all elements of the weather information value chain. Innovation is catalyzed through three core projects.

The High-Impact Weather project (HIWeather) is a 10-yr activity within the World Weather Research Programme to promote cooperative international research to achieve a dramatic increase in resilience to high-impact weather, worldwide, through improving forecasts for time scales of minutes to 2 weeks and enhancing their communication and utility in social, economic, and environmental applications. Climate change is constraining us to improve preparedness for future hazards over a wide range of applications and actors. A first approach would be the evaluation of the level of resilience for current society, detecting crucial thresholds—for specific sectors and society as a whole—beyond which environmental, social, or economic stability would be endangered. HIWeather is aimed at developing and applying new knowledge for 21st-century disaster risk reduction.

Concerns about amplification of anthropogenic climate change has led to a growing interest in the polar regions in recent years. Furthermore, increasing economic and transportation activities in polar regions are leading to more demand for sustained and improved availability of integrated observational and predictive weather, climate, and water information to support decision-making. However, many gaps in weather, subseasonal, and seasonal forecasting in polar regions hamper reliable decision-making. The World Weather Research Programme's Polar Prediction Project aims to advance the science in numerical modeling, observing, assimilation, ensemble forecast methods, verification, user engagement, and the production of prediction products—all with a polar emphasis. The Year of Polar Prediction, whose core phase runs from mid-2017 to mid-2019, is the key activity of PPP.

The World Weather and World Climate Research Programmes launched the Subseasonal to Seasonal Project aiming to provide predictions from 2 weeks to 2 months ahead From the end-user perspective, the subseasonal to seasonal time range is a very important one, as many management decisions in agriculture and food security, water disaster risk reduction, and health fall into this range. Improved weather-to-climate forecasts tailored to key social needs promise to be of significant social and economic value. Recent research has indicated potential sources of predictability for the subseasonal to seasonal time range. Identifying windows of opportunity with increased forecast skill could be the basis for enhanced, actionable forecasts. Specific attention is paid to the risk of extreme events, including tropical cyclones, droughts, floods, heat waves, and the waxing and waning of monsoon precipitation.