The 14th CIMHET meeting (Conference of the Directors of Ibero-American Meteorological and Hydrological Services) took place from 7 to 9 March in Willemstad, the capital of the Caribbean island of Curaçao. After the participation of ECMWF’s Forecast Department in previous CIMHET meetings, on this occasion the organisers were keen to hear about the EU’s Copernicus programme and the two services operated by ECMWF: the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
During the third working session of the meeting, entitled ‘Provision of Weather, Climate and Hydrological Services’, we presented the wealth of products and services already available from CAMS and explained the capabilities of C3S’s Climate Data Store (CDS). As a taster of the latter, our presentation of the ERA5 reanalysis currently in production and of C3S multi-model seasonal forecast datasets attracted a lot of interest among the participants. Other topics discussed at the meeting included training, institutional development and resource allocation and the proposed restructuring of World Meteorological Organization governing bodies. The final Conference declaration explicitly took note of the interest in CAMS and C3S products and acknowledged ECMWF’s attendance at the meeting.
CIMHET was established in 2003 to develop an Ibero-American Cooperation Programme in Meteorology and Hydrology bringing together the national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. The Conference is coordinated by the Spanish meteorological service AEMET (Agencia Estatal de Meteorología) and is mainly funded by a trust fund started by the Spanish Government and its international development cooperation agency (AECID).