Thomas Krennert from GeoSphere Austria, also known as the Austrian National Weather Service, presented at the fourth webinar of the YESS-HIWeather webinar series. Thomas has been a renowned senior forecaster since 2000 at GeoSphere. He is the inventor and co-founder of the trusted spotter network in Austria and researches on atmospheric convection and weather-type classification. He is also responsible for the citizen science program (wettermelden.at) in Austria. This webinar mainly focused on the activities conducted by GeoSphere Austria along with EUMETNET and other weather-related European organizations.
Thomas started the webinar by explaining the history of the Geosphere and Austrian weather. He also discussed how GeoSphere engaged with the Meteoalarm project which standardises and coordinates impact-based warnings in the whole of Europe. He also shared that GeoSphere is collaborating with SKYWARN Austria, which is an organisation of weather-enthusiastic people mainly in Europe. Everyone was amazed to hear about the training programmes and workshops conducted through the trusted spotter network and was fascinated by the encouragement given to the spotters through certificates of participation.
Another major webinar highlight was the Wettermelden.at web app and its services. As Thomas highlighted, there are 195 weather parameters in this web app where people can enter any weather observation and learn about their impacts. The simplicity of the web app was also pointed out. He also discussed how GeoSphere engages in KI-image recognition and its connection with EUMETNET and other organizations. Thomas explained, as part of their work, how they encourage children to learn about weather phenomena and their impacts through webinars, workshops, seminars, and visits.
This fruitful discussion ended with a Q & A session where the audience raised questions on how ground truth observations feed into model verification and assimilation, the level of engagement with citizens, and the concept of the development of the trusted spotter network.
Watch the full webinar session here:
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