OU Meteorology director David Parsons named founding member of Global Weather Enterprise Forum

Professor David Parsons, Director of the School of Meteorology, has been named a founding member of the Global Weather Enterprise Forum (GWEF). The overall aim of the Forum is to provide dialogue between the public, private and academic sectors to enhance collaboration for the advancement and delivery of weather and climate science, infrastructure and services across the world for the benefit of all parties and in particular people, communities and businesses internationally. The operation of the GWEF is coordinated and facilitated by United Nations’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the World Bank’s Global Facility For Disaster Reduction and Recovery and the Association of Hydro-Meteorological Equipment Industry. The GWEF is being established in part due to the changing and growing role of the private sector in the weather enterprise. The founding membership consists of four representatives from each of the public, private and academic sectors comprising a total membership of twelve individuals from across the world.   The need for the Forum was an outcome of the discussion at the Global Weather Enterprise (GWE) Seminar, organized by the World Bank Group in collaboration with the WMO on 28 November 2017 in Washington DC  (see https://www.gfdrr.org/en/publication/report-global-weather-enterprise-seminar for a summary of that seminar).