WCRP Secretariat and IPOs Telecon in May

The WCRP Secretariat and International Project Offices (IPOs) telecon was organized on 6th May 2021, with the participation of representatives from the IPOs of CliC, CLIVAR, SPARC, CORDEX, S2S, CORA, Monsoon, YESS and WCRP Secretariat. The major uptakes from the telecon are:

  • Staff changes in WCRP Secretariat and IPOs: Nico Caltabiano and Narelle van der Wel will join WCRP Secretariat as full staff and a third full staff is being recruited; Valery Detemmerman for 2023 WCRP Open Science Conference (OSC); Armelle Remedio (CORA); Sabrina Zechlau (SPARC);  
  • The 42nd Session of WCRP Joint Steering Committee will be organized from 28 June to 2 July 2021. Draft agenda and presentation and report templates are being finalized and to be distributed shortly;
  • Upcoming WCRP Climate Research Forums: North and Central America, the Caribbean, and Greenland (11 May 2021); Southeast Asia (25 May 2021) and Europe and Western Asia (9 June 2021). There used to be 200-300 people participated in the previous CRFs;
  • Several workshops, seminar series, white papers are being prepared by LHAs;
  • The WCRP Open Science Conference will be organized in Spring (Boreal) 2023. A subset of JSC chaired by Detlef Stammer formulated the concept document. The conference is expected to have 1,000 people participating in-person, and with a similar number of online participants. There were suggestions to gather the participants to regional hubs, similar to the CORDEX conference and SPARC General Assembly which are being prepared;
  • Uptakes from IPOs updates:
  1. CLIVAR: 2nd Sea Level Conference will be organized in July 2022 in Singapore, as the sunset activity of the WCRP Sea Level Grand Challenge.
  2. SPARC: Strategy is being updated;
  3. CORDEX: ready to release the white paper on downscaling protocol; linking to RifS; CORDEX 2020 report released by CORDEX office;
  4. S2S: Prize Challenge to improve Sub-seasonal to Seasonal Predictions using Artificial Intelligence; linking to RifS;
  5. CORA: First Meeting of the Interim Coordinating Group (ICG) and 1st meeting of building blocks (BB) of RifS organized to develop the RifS Science Plan.
  6. Monsoon: ICMPO will be upgraded to IMPO in May; international workshop on S2S prediction and monsoon is being prepared;
  7. YESS: 1st Learning Group on AI/ML established and two webinars will be organized; 2nd Webinar series will be organized with CORDEX; 2 YESS members joined science committee of WWRP/WCRP symposium;
  • Again, IPOs would like to improve the internal communications between IPOs and WCRP Secretariat. Sli.do is recommended as an easy-to-use tool for communication;
  • The next WCRP Secretariat and IPOs meeting will be organized in July and hosted by the newly established WWRP/WCRP International Monsoon Project Office (IMPO).

The key messages brought from ICPO were:

  • The 2nd Sea Level Conference will be organized in July 2022 in Singapore, as the sunset activity of the WCRP Sea Level Grand Challenge.
  • Jose Santos, Executive Director of ICPO is still working from Ecuador now, and he is planning to come back to China in June.