FECT authours Lareef Zubair , Nipuni Alahakoon , Ushan Adithya , Azra Munas and Ashara Nijamdeen have submitted an abstract on the lessons we have learnt from providing climate services in Sri Lanka and Maldives for a scientific meeting of the American Geophysical Union

The plain language summary of the abstract follows:

Sri Lanka and the Maldives are vulnerable to climate variability and change. The Federation for Environment, Climate and Technology (FECT) has been working with the hydrological and meteorological agencies and water resources and environmental sectors in these countries to develop the climatological information, customized monitoring systems that collect satellite and local data, and to develop fine-scale prediction systems. Based on this, FECT and its partners provide Climate Bulletin for Sri Lanka since 2008 and for Maldives since 2012. These advisories help people to understand the weather, intra-seasonal and seasonal variations of climate. It also leads to improvement of our systems, and helps translate this information to support water management, dengue risk management, and agricultural systems. The advisory is distributed by email and social media.

The lessons learned here:

• There is a need for information
• There is a lack of resources to sustain a climatological information system in the topics.
• There is a high demand for interpretive products such as heat stress, drought and flood hazard and air quality.
• Need to render information in a simpler way that can be understood by everyone.
• Need to provide interpretive communication and social media channels for engagement.

Authors : L. Zubair, N. Alahakoon, U. Adithya, A. Munas, A. Nijamdeen