EMS Outreach & Communication Award 2015 for the UK Festival of Weather, Arts and Music (WAM)

The EMS Outreach & Communication Award 2015 is presented to the UK Festival of Weather, Arts and Music; two other projects will receive honourable mentions.

Founded in 2012 by Pierrette Thomet Stott, the Festival of Weather, Arts and Music (WAM) has found new ways to communicate the beauty and fascination of meteorology thereby enhancing the understanding of weather and climate science by the general public in the United Kingdom. This outstanding initiative has broadened the reach of scientific meteorology, enabled the general public to engage with meteorology in novel ways and enhanced many people’s appreciation of its effects on our lives and the challenges involved in forecasting it. The list of innovative approaches combining arts and meteorology is long.

Since its foundation in 2012, WAM has held three very successful events. The first festival in 2012 saw about a thousand people take part in a wide variety of events in Reading Town Hall. These included a weather fair, music recitals, a Climate Change Question Time, an art exhibition, a weather clinic, and a recreation of Lewis Fry Richardson’s Forecast Factory.

Pierrette Thomet Stott, the WAM Director, said: “I am absolutely delighted to find WAM has found this recognition in European circles, and I am deeply honoured by this award.”

About Pierrette Thomet Stott: She holds a BA in Music from the University of Reading and a Diploma in Operatic Performance from the University of London. She trained as a mezzo-soprano and has performed in Great Britain and abroad as a recitalist and oratorio soloist as well as having many years’ experience teaching singing. In 2011 Pierrette devised the idea for a festival bringing together the arts and meteorology/climate science, to promote Reading as a centre of excellence in both fields and explore the possibilities inherent in bringing these different disciplines to interact. Since the first WAM Festival she has led the development of WAM through the RMetS WAM Special Interest Group, which she chairs.

More information on WAM events:

The Award wil be presented during the Awards Session of the EMS Annual Meeting in Sofia on 08 September 2015. Pierrette Thomet Stott will also present the project and talk about upcoming projects during the Media & Communication Session on Thursday, 10 September 2015.

Two more interesting projects were submitted for the award that deserve being highlighted:

A short video on the application of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for atmospheric remote sensing

As a part of her Marie Curie fellowship, Dr. Guergana Guerova, associate professor at Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, Sofia, together with students at Sofia University, developed a short video on the application of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for atmospheric remote sensing.

The video is innovative and well presented, with clear explanations and nice illustrations. Using an approach of talking and drawing, explained clearly and visually, it helps enhancing people’s understanding. It is pitched at a level that makes it relevant to a wide audience.

The team includes: Dr. Guergana Guerova, Tzvetan Simeonov, PhD student on GNSS Meteorology at Sofia University and Rositsa Topchiyska hold BSc degree from the Physics Faculty of Sofia University and is currently working in a private company.

Tzvetan Simeonov will give a presentation on the video and how it was developed in the Education Session during the Annual Meeting in Sofia on Tuesday, 08 September 2015 at 17:00: http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EMS2015/orals/19106

We are Water Foundation www.wearewater.org/en/

The We Are Water Foundation is focused on raising awareness for world’s water problem. The foundation has a broad outreach: It provides a wealth of information on its website that is well presented and relevant. It produces short videos and documentaries about water shortage, water pollution, inequality in the world, which serve to instigate debate and to focus discussion.

We are Water Foundation is also involved with broadcast meteorologists, co-hosting for example a workshop on Communicating Climate Change and best practices in cases of Water Stress with the IABM (International Association of Broadcast Meteorology, www.iabm.org ) during the recent World Meteorological Day.

Tomas Molina will give a presentation on the project in the Session on Media & Communication on Thursday, 10 September 2015.

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