Weather Risk Reduction in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean
The main objective of the project RISKMED is to build an early warning system for severe weather events (e.g. heavy rain and snowfall, strong surface winds, high waves, extreme temperatures) occurring over the Central and Eastern Mediterranean. It is well known that our society is vulnerable to severe weather events, including heavy rainfall and snowfall, lightning strokes, high winds and waves (especially in coastal areas) as well as extreme high and low temperatures. These events have an adverse impact to humans as well as to a large number of social and economic activities. The Mediterranean is an area notorious for severe weather events, mainly due to the formation of Mediterranean storms in autumn and winter and for the occurrence of high surface temperatures (heat waves) during summer. In order to address this problem, the accurate prediction of adverse weather events and the dissemination of warnings to the relevant authorities and to the public is a very important but also a demanding task. Therefore, the main objective of the proposed work is to build an early warning system that will provide accurate and detailed weather forecasts and it will disseminate the corresponding warnings. In order to meet this objective, a solid partnership is anticipated, comprising scientific groups and end-users from all four EU countries participating in ARCHIMED. The scientific partners will build and demonstrate a system capable of producing detailed weather forecasts, based on observations (mainly from satellites since a major part of ARCHIMED domain is covered by the sea) as well as from high-resolution weather and wave models. In collaboration with the end-users of the project (regional authorities and civil defense agencies) the weather and wave forecasts will be tailored according to their specific needs and the final warning system will be constructed and operated, disseminating the warnings to them.