1. Cataloguing Extreme Weather, Water and Climate Events
Opening sesssion CBS TECO
Geneva, Switzerland
26 March 2018

2. WMO Congress 17 Resolution will improve monitoring the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
Systematic characterization and cataloguing of extreme weather and climate events in a form that allows data on losses and damage to be cross-referenced to the phenomena

3. Background Resolution 9 (Cg-17) focuses on role and mandate of NMHS.
While NMHS can, and in many cases do, archive hazard information, generally it is not the mandate of NMHS to maintain official national account of losses and damages
Mandate for maintaining loss and damage information lies (normally) with other agencies (such as disaster risk management agency or national office of statistics).
Development of database with hazard events and impacts requires partnership between mandated agency to record loss and damage information and NMHS

4. Background

5. Linked and compounded hazards
Linked hazards
Are risks that have separate impacts that are connected to the same event. Linked risks could be cascading risks (one risk causes another risk to be more likely which in turn causes another one to be more likely and so on). Linked risks could also happen when one risk increases the likelihood of multiple unconnected risks occurring.
Example: rain results in flood, results in landslides leading to transport disruption
Compounded hazards
These are events that happen at roughly the same time (or in close succession of each other) with impacts that combine to increase the overall impact (either by causing greater impacts directly or by affecting the system’s capacity to respond to all the impacts).
Example: wind and snow, lead to blizzards and acceration, leading to power cuts

6. Warnings reflect potential impacts
Event Id #
Event area to be extended as system progresses toward the east.

7. Layering of Information Enables New Possibilities for Analysis and Application
Loss & Damage
Climate
Warnings

8. Estimating and cataloguing loss & damage
Example from EM-DAT,
the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database

9. International Workshop IPTT – CWWCE
Resolution 9 (Cg-17)
Decides to standardize weather, water, climate, space weather and other related environmental hazard and risk information and develop identifiers for cataloguing weather, water and climate extreme events;
Requests the Executive Council to provide oversight on the standardization of hazard information for loss and damage assessment;
Requests the Commission for Basic Systems to develop, in collaboration with all technical commissions and regional associations, a proposal on standardized identifiers for cataloguing hazardous events for consideration by the Executive Council;
Requests the Secretary-General to take the necessary actions, within the available budgetary resources, to facilitate the work on this important issue.

10. Event Record

11. Cascading Event Records
Event UUID: random string of 36 characters
114bd279-dde4-48c9-b20d-db1c967bfa4c
3fdaa43c-51d0-414f-a26a-e23de203aa76
Regional (e.g. Europe)
Heavy Rain
Flooding
Global (ad hoc analysis)
National
(e.g. Germany)
Heavy rain
Flooding
Strong gale
f3df3f ffe-beea-021af820bc47
0882b06f-ed9a-40d2-9f96-df0da7130ee9
3b3a30ec-03f3-445d-8f86-76cb5447e9ee

12. The Approach
Centres on identifying events uniquely, while at the same time being able to group together events which are hydro-meteorologically related.
Involves assigning a universally unique identifier (UUID) number to each event including key attributes of the event into a data record.
Other attributes are to be included that provide context such as description, local identifier (e.g. local or regional names of storms), and links to other events which would enable clustering of events (e.g. events linked to other events) to mirror larger scale (synoptic) phenomena.

13. “If we implement this solution we will have done a great service for humankind”
Julio Serje
UNISDR

14. Thank you
Merci