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This chapter discusses the information gaps relating to the type, level of accuracy and frequency of delivery of specific weather and climate information, and what extra information is required by the energy sector in the coming years. It is argued that ongoing technical and scientific interaction between weather and climate service providers and the energy sector, supported by input from the information and communication technologies, can help bridge these gaps. This will help the users in the energy sector to both understand and respond appropriately to the available weather and climate information. Focusing on the linkages between weather-, climate- and energy-related information and data, the chapter draws attention to barriers to data sharing, benefits of overcoming the barriers and strategies to enhance data-sharing arrangements between the weather, climate and energy communities.

Weather and climate services rely on the production and delivery of relevant, credible and, of course, valuable information. In this sense, the energy industry, with its long-standing and varied needs for these services and strong experience, provides a solid test bed for assessing these services. However, it is argued here that, whether for public or commercial use, weather and climate services are, in essence, no different to other more familiar services (e.g. financial). For weather and especially the more recent climate services to succeed, it is therefore important that lessons from these other common services—which also often deal with uncertain and complex information—are considered. It is also natural and important that the burgeoning climate services learn from the more mature and analogous weather services in order to leapfrog development. Initial public investment is critical to spur development of these services. Such investment should then be phased out in a managed way to avoid abruptly interrupting their growth phase and therefore jeopardising their sustainability, given the strong effort that is also being invested into developing these services. The criticalities of the weather and climate services—such as the accuracy and skill of the information—need to be borne in mind when modulating public investment.

The launch of the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS, Hewitt et al., 2(12): 831–832, ) just a few years ago helped to redirect the focus of the climate community towards the users and their information needs. A number of national and international initiatives such as the Climate Service Partnership, or the Climate Science for Services Partnership between China and the UK, were designed to build upon such an international framework. The role of the European Commission appears to be very prominent in the international climate services landscape as it supported a largenumber of research and innovation programmes in the field. The chapter discusses the role climate services could play for the energy sector starting from an analysis of the interactions that already exist and building upon a few specific examples that indicate some good practice in climate service development.

The energy sector significantly depends on weather and climate variability, which impacts both demand and supply, at all timescales. Over the next decades, climate change mitigation and adaptation will lead to an overhaul in energy systems, to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. Low carbon energy generation is key to facing this challenge, but its renewable part—mainly from wind, solar and hydro power—will even increase the exposure of the sector to weather and climate factors. Energy companies can assess their preparation to tackle the impact of weather volatility on their operations by running a weather-readiness assessment. This chapter provides an overview of the energy sector today, together with future scenarios and challenges. The weather-readiness concept is then presented in detail and demonstrates that stronger collaboration between the energy industry and the meteorological community is key to reducing the risks posed by climate variability and change, and allow a more effective integration of high-quality weather and climate information into energy sector activities, to better manage power systems on all timescales from a few days to several decades.

The interplay between energy and meteorology (based on its broad meaning of weather, water and climate) has been steadily growing. For this relationship to continue flourishing, a formal structure for stakeholders to interact effectively is required. The process of formation of the World Energy & Meteorology Council (WEMC), an organisation aimed at promoting and strengthening such a relationship, is discussed in this chapter. Such a process involves building many diverse relationships, something which has been happening over several years, alongside the adoption of more formal practices such as stakeholder surveys. While the focus of this chapter is clearly on WEMC, this process could be used as a stimulus for analogous activities in the broader energy and meteorology area, specifically those at the national and regional levels, as well as similar activities straddling diverse disciplines, such as those promoted by the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS).

The prediction and simulation of future weather and climate is a key ingredient in good weather risk management. This chapter briefly reviews the nature and underlying sources of predictability on timescales from hours-ahead to centuries-ahead. The traditional distinction between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ predictions is described, and the role of recent scientific developments in driving a convergence of these two classic problems is highlighted. The chapter concludes by outlining and comparing the two main strategies used for creating weather and climate predictions, and discussing the challenges of using predictions in quantitative applications.

Short-range forecasts for periods on the order of hours to days and up to two weeks ahead are necessary to smoothly run transmission and distribution systems, plan maintenance, protect infrastructure and allocate units. In particular, forecasting the renewable energy resources on a day-to-day basis enables integration of increasing capacities of these variable resources. This chapter describes the basics of this short-range forecasting, beginning with the observation-based “nowcasting” of the first 15 minutes and ranging up to two weeks using numerical weather prediction. We discuss how blending multiple forecasts can increase accuracy and how probabilistic forecasts are being used to quantify the forecast uncertainty.

The chapter provides an overview of ensemble weather forecasting for the medium- and extended-range (days to weeks ahead). It reviews the methods used to account for uncertainties in the initial conditions and in the forecast models themselves. The chapter explores the challenges of making useful forecasts for the sub-seasonal timescale, beyond the typical limit for skilful day-to-day forecasts, and considers some of the sources of predictability such as the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) that make this possible. It then introduces some of the ensemble-based forecast products and concludes with a case study for a European heat wave that demonstrates how ensemble weather forecasts can be used to guide decision making for weather-dependent activities.

Forecasting climate over the near-term, from a season to decades ahead, has the potential to inform decision-making within the energy sector in a number of ways: from energy trading to scheduling maintenance and resource management. Recent advances in forecasting at these timescales have led to promising levels of skill in predicting the large-scale drivers of seasonal and multi-annual climate variability as well as the consequent local climate impacts of relevance for the energy sector (e.g. seasonal temperatures and wind speeds). This chapter discusses the unique aspects of near-term prediction, how it differs from the task of weather prediction and long-term climate projections, the sources of predictability on these timescales, as well as some of the current climate forecasting tools and products aiming to provide value to the energy sector.

When designing adaptation and mitigation measures of climate change for the coming decades and up to the middle of the century, policymakers and industries must rely upon climate information that is at an appropriate scale to evaluate impacts, vulnerabilities and risks due to changes in climate. It is, therefore, essential that the quantitative information on the climate and its impacts is reliable. Reliable quantitative information about climate change impacts must also be available. This includes estimations of uncertainty bounds. In the current state of knowledge, technology and structure of scientific communities, climate change impact studies are achieved from a suite of models: global earth system models, with a generally low-resolution (100–300 km), regional limited-area climate models with a higher resolution (10–50 km), which take their boundary conditions from global models and impact models calculating how changes in weather, ocean and biogeochemical cycles affect the system to be adapted.