WMO International Weather Apps Awards

The Awards Dashboard provides you with the details of the Awards 2020 including the recording of the ceremony - all in one place. See it below: 

DOCUMENTS

Awards

Evaluation

General Conditions

Copyright

NEWS

• WMO announces winners of Weather Apps Awards and calendar competition

BACKGROUND 

In 1991 the Australian rock group Crowded House wrote the song “Weather with You” with its popular refrain “Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you". Whatever meaning the band put in this line of lyrics 30 years ago, it represents nicely today’s situation when so many people have the weather (apps) on their smartphones. It is indeed possible nowadays to take the weather with you wherever you go, thanks to the hundreds and thousands of weather apps available through popular app stores. This has definitely changed the way people access and use weather information in their daily activities. Weather apps do more than just tell users what is set to happen – they can be vital decision-making tools in critical situations. This means that app development is a crucial link in the weather and climate service delivery chain. However, the huge variety of functionality, quality, and usefulness of these mobile apps presents challenges to both users and information providers. Weather forecasting has been a field of intensive innovation for centuries. This innovation has been stimulated and encouraged by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) ever since its creation in 1950. Many stakeholders from the public sector - the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, from the private sector - the weather companies, and from academia - universities and research institutions, have contributed to those innovations, thanks to which we now do take the weather with us all the time. WMO wants to provide recognition and stimulate the development, of ever-improving mobile-based applications for weather and climate information. The “WMO International Weather Apps Awards (WIWAA)”, were issued for the first time in 2020 as part of the celebrations of the organization’s 70th anniversary. The idea of these awards is to invite developers to participate by submitting their apps for review by an independent international jury. Depending on the success of this first event, the WIWAA may become a regular annual event in the years to come. The Awards 2020 underscored the importance of sharing know-how and innovation in providing services to society, through identifying and recognizing high standards and good practices for weather apps. A special focus was given to the situation of developing countries where people have less access to vital weather and climate information. The aim is to stimulate app development for those countries through collaborative partnerships between National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, the private sector, and academia.

2020 AWARDS CEREMONY 

WMO International Weather Apps Awards celebrate and reward excellence in ever-improving mobile-based applications for weather and climate information. 

We have announced the Shortlist, Winners, and Honourable Mentions for three categories of groups during the event: 

Category 1 -  Awards for innovation and promotion of the use of weather and climate information for development 

Category 2 - Specialized apps award category

Category 3 - Public weather forecasts and information (general category) 

Our Awards Dashboard provides you with the details of the Awards 2020 including the recording of the ceremony - all in one place.

International Jury Members 

Chair

• GERALD FLEMING| Ireland  
  • Gerald Fleming retired as Head of Forecast Division for Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Service in 2017. He took out B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in Experimental Physics before entering the profession of meteorology in 1980. For most of his 37 years with Met Éireann he worked as a weather forecaster and a weather broadcaster; he led the television weather team for Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ for about two decades. A founder member and past Chairman of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorology, he was Co-Chair of the First World Conference on Broadcast Meteorology (Barcelona, 2004). A member of the Irish Meteorological Society and the American Meteorological Society, he is active in the European Meteorological Society and was awarded the EMS Silver Medal, their highest honour, in 2019. For the World Meteorological Organisation he was Chair of the Expert Team on Media Issues for 6 years, Chair of the Programme on Public Weather Services for 15 years, and contributed to many WMO initiatives in the fields of outreach, communication and service delivery. He has lectured extensively and delivered many training courses on weather communication and related matters. He currently works as a meteorological expert on a range of development projects, mostly in South Asia.

Weather Experts

• NEIL GORDON | New Zealand  
  • Dr Neil Gordon worked for the Meteorological Service of New Zealand from 1968 to 2011. The first half of his career including observing, bench forecasting, and research - specialising in the application of computers and models in forecasting. His responsibilities as a senior manager in the second half of his career included managing the entire forecasting function from 1988 to 1992, and the National Weather Services division from 1992 to 2005. Neil’s extensive involvement with WMO included being President of the Commission for Aeronautical Meteorology from 1999 to 2006, and Permanent Representative of NZ with WMO in 1992, and again from 2010 to 2011. After his retirement from MetService, he provided consultancy support to help establish WMO’s Polar Prediction Project and plan the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP). Neil is an early adopter of technology with far too many apps on his iPhone, and an accomplished photographer.

• CHI MING (CM) SHUN| Hong Kong, China  
  • Mr Chi Ming (CM) Shun was Director of the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) and Permanent Representative of Hong Kong, China with WMO during 2011-2020. He joined the HKO in 1986 as a scientific officer and worked in the areas of operational weather forecasting, aviation weather services, nuclear radiation monitoring, and numerical weather prediction, amongst others. One of his scientific achievements was leading the innovative development of the internationally-recognized Doppler LIght Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) windshear alerting system for the Hong Kong International Airport. As Director of the HKO, Mr Shun was responsible for operating the multi-hazard early warning system in Hong Kong, China. Notable events that he handled were direct hits of supertyphoons Hato (2017) and Mangkhut (2018) with zero fatalities. His international involvements included being the Chair of the Asia/Pacific Met Sub-group of the ICAO from 2003 to 2009, and the President of the Commission for Aeronautical Meteorology of the WMO from 2010 to 2018. Mr Shun was also Chair of the Hong Kong Meteorological Society from 2011 to 2020 and spearheaded the publication of the first book on clouds and atmospheric optical phenomena in Hong Kong, China in July 2020. Mr Shun has been active in communicating directly with members of the public and journalists on facebook and inspired colleagues to develop social media weather services for the HKO in the past several years.

• CAROLINA CERRUDO| Argentina  
  • Carolina Cerrudo has a degree in Atmosphere Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has many years of experience in science popularization and communication to different kind of audience. This vocation impulses her to study a social science post-degree in “Public Communication of Science and Technology”. She has been teaching for more than 12 years in the university and in the National Meteorological Service (NMS) of Argentina. Carolina is currently working in the Services and Applications area at the NMS. She has experience in the organization and coordination of different trainings focused on extreme meteorological phenomena communication and services applications for different users, precipitation studies, impact weather forecast, elaboration of products and reports due to impact weather, like the “Weekly Overlook of High Impact Weather Events”. She has been a member of the “Impact-Based Forecast and Warnings Services” Expert Team of the WMO Commission for Basic Systems since 2016. She has also been a member of the organizing committee of training and academic events, such as, the “Regional Association III Workshop on Impact-based Forecasting and Risk-based Warning and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)”, and the “Argentinian Meteorological Congress”. Nowadays she is a member of the editorial committee of NMS magazine called “Meteoros”, and she is working on laying the foundations for IBF future implementation, in the context of the NMS strategic plan.

• JESPER THEILGAARD| Denmark  
  • Jesper Theilgaard is an aeronautical meteorologist and served in Copenhagen Airport in 15 years. He changed in 1990 to Danish National TV as weather presenter, later chiefmeteorologist. He became the climate expert at the station and was reporting from several COP-meetings. Together with colleagues worldwide, he and his team founded “Climate without borders”. He left tv in 2018 after more than 27 years and founded a company “climatecommunication.eu” or “klimaformidling.dk” in order to intensify the climate debate in Denmark. He has written several books among which the big “Bible” of the Danish weather received one of the greatest award for this type of books. He wrote and spoke the climate film “Climate Planet” (it will probably be released free on Youtube later this year. Beside this, he is giving a lot of speeches about climate change – mostly in Denmark - in schools, companies, political parties, conferences a.s.o

• MUSANGANIRE ALPHONSINE| Rwanda  
  • Musanganire Alphonsine serves as Senior Meteorological Application officer in Meteo Rwanda. She has 14 years of experience in weather forecast and weather presentation, which includes 2 years worked as Climate Services and Policy Liaison Expert between 2015 and 2017 at ACMAD-Niamey on Diploma in Meteorology, BSc in Environmental Sciences and Masters student in Environmental Information Systems. She has been providing training skills on TV Weather Presentation, a collaborative work with WMO and UK Met Office.

• JAI-HO OH| Republic of Korea  
  • Professor OH is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Atmospheric Sciences and Senior Researcher of the Supercomputing Center of the Pukyong National University He is also one of founders of NanoWeather Co. Ltd. In 2018. His primary field of research is Climate System, however, his current research interests include numerical weather prediction, disaster prevention, early warning, and regional impact of climate change. He has published more than 120 research papers and 27 books. He has been the President of the Korean Supercomputing Association since 2009 and he had been the President of Asia Oceania Geosciences Society, Atmospheric Science Section, and Editor-in-chief of Advances in Geosciences.

Journalists

• ANN MARIE GARDNER| USA  
  • Award-winning editor, writer, and entrepreneur, Ann Marie Gardner has launched and edited media brands including Modern Farmer, Monocle, and the NY Times Style Magazine's T Travel. She most recently launched and sold weather content platform, Tempest. Currently, Gardner is a contributing editor at Monocle and partner at Earthrise Media, a creative agency for environmental storytelling. Gardner has contributed to Monocle, The New York Times, First Look Media, Discover, Four & Sons, Japanese Vogue, Kinfolk, The London Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Food and Wine, FT How to Spend It, Discover, Departures, London’s Saturday Telegraph Magazine, among many others. She was a 2016/2017 Research Affiliate at MIT Media Lab's Open Agriculture Initiative, is a mentor at Square Roots Urban Farm Accelerator and was named a 2014 Folio 100 for Dynamic Disruption, for ‘defying’ current media climates to start Modern Farmer.

• SEONG-HAN KIM| Republic of Korea  
  • Seong-Han KIM is a TV journalist in KBS. KBS is a public broadcaster and also a host disaster broadcaster in Korea. He is a specialist in Meteorology and Disaster Broadcasting. He has 16 years of experience in weather communication and nowadays his main mission in KBS is to improve disaster broadcasting that requires gathering disaster-related information and visualization. He gets BSs in Atmospheric Science and after graduation serves military service as a weather officer in Air Force. With this field career, he got a license of Professional Engineer Weather Forecaster. Also, he has 5 years of system developer career including 3 years of experience as a developer leader in a private weather company.

Data Visualisation

• KARL EGGESTAD | Norway  
  • Mr. Eggestad holds an MSc in applied mathematics, physics and computer science from the University of Trondheim. His thesis was on real time visualization of large scale numerical modeling data from the CRAY supercomputer in Trondheim, with emphasis on black oil simulation and weather/climate prediction. Out of University, Mr. Eggestad was a research scientist at SINTEF for almost a decade, before establishing the company WeatherOne (Metaphor Systems) as a commercial spin-off from SINTEF, in strong cooperation with TV 2 in Norway. The company would go on to create one of the most successful broadcast weather graphics systems in the world, the Metacast, which today remains a leading broadcast meteorology visualization system, now under the company ChyronHego. Mr. Eggestad is passionate about weather, climate and making the population everywhere weather aware and weather prepared; and from June 2020, he is appointed as a senior expert advisor for Chyron Corporation, while dedicating most of his time to being a climate awareness and renewable energy advocate.

Academia/Data Science/Social Science

• GINA EOSCO | USA  
  • Dr. Gina Eosco is the Social Science and FACETs (Forecasting A Continuum of Environmental Threats) Program Manager for NOAA's Weather Program Office. As a social scientist, Dr. Eosco focuses on the human dimensions of weather science, forecasts, and services ensuring that people, including forecasters, partners, and publics, are part of the research and application process. Of importance to her is enhancing our understanding of the forecaster operational decision environments to optimize usability of new modeling tools and software technologies; increasing our understanding of how partners and publics process weather risk information and its associated uncertainty to empower their respective decision environments; and lastly, facilitating the application of the FACETs framework combining the use of probabilistic hazard information with decision contexts to create meaningful information to enhance our service to the public. Prior to joining NOAA, Dr. Gina Eosco worked as a social scientist and risk communication expert for 2 years with Cherokee Nation Strategic Programs (CNSP) supporting NOAA's Weather Program Office. Before CNSP, she worked for Eastern Research Group conducting stakeholder engagement activities, employing social science research, as well as translating science into policy documents. At ERG, she worked with scientific agencies such as the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service on evaluating visual designs, new warnings, and most notably, the hazard simplification project, an evaluation of the NWS watch, warning, and advisory program. She has extensive facilitation experience conducting over 60 focus groups and workshops over the last 5 years with emergency managers, broadcast meteorologists, NWS forecasters, and the public. She is an active member of the Society for Risk Analysis, National Weather Association, as well as the American Meteorological Society, their 2019 recipient of the AMS Award for Early Career Professional Achievement. Dr. Eosco earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in weather risk communication from Cornell University, and a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy from the University of Maryland.

• ROCHÉ MAHON| CIMH Barbados  
  • Dr. Roché Mahon is the Social Science lead contributing to the Climate Services programme of the World Meteorological Organization’s Regional Climate Centre for the Caribbean hosted at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology. In this role, she serves among a regional team of climatologists, meteorologists and sectoral experts co-designing, co-developing and co-delivering climate products and services to six climate-sensitive sectors in 16 Caribbean countries. A core focus of that work is establishing Early Warning Information Systems across Climate Timescales (EWISACTs) for the agriculture and food security, water, health, disaster risk reduction, energy and tourism sectors in the Caribbean.

• PADRAIG MURPHY | Ireland  
  • Dr. Pádraig Murphy is Assistant Professor in Communication at Dublin City University and Chair of the MSc in Science and Health Communication programme. His teaching and research interests include science communication, Science and Technology Studies and public engagement with science and technology. His research and writing focuses on deliberative and participatory dialogue models for biotechnology, nanotechnology, green innovation and other future and emerging technologies. Dr. Murphy is the Irish Principal Investigator on several European Horizon 2020 engaged research projects on Responsible Research and Innovation, including NUCLEUS, OSOS, RRING and PERARES as well as the Erasmus project CASE. He conducted a citizens’ jury on the trialling of the GM potato in Ireland, the Irish GM Potato Community of Inquiry project, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Murphy also coordinates the Celsius research group at DCU. He was appointed to the Campus Engage working group on Engaged Research in 2015. He is author of Biotechnology, Education and Life Politics: Debating Genetic Futures from School to Society (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Little Country, Big Talk: Science Communication in Ireland (2017).