Instructor guide for hydrometeorological information for Disaster Risk Reduction - Menalled, D'Amen and Parrish
Matias Menalled, Daniela D’Amen and Patrick Parrish
In 2017, the Argentinian National Meteorological Service developed the virtual workshop Meteorology in the framework of disaster risk reduction: Interaction between National Meteorological and Hydrological Services and decision-makers. The workshop was targeted at the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) and emergency agencies of Regional Association III (South America) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Its main objective was to strengthen coordination among different institutions involved in disaster risk management in the Region by promoting effective sharing of meteorological information among different users for disaster risk reduction (DRR). To this end, the Argentinian National Meteorological Service created an office to integrate the social science dimensions of disaster risk management in its operations so as to be able to properly orient decision-makers in relevant national institutions involved in DRR, such as Civil Protection and Defence. The virtual workshop followed the WMO guidelines regarding the role that NMHSs should play in disaster management, on the basis of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. The workshop promoted the coordination of NMHSs in the Region in all aspects of disaster risk management, in particular the process of issuing early warnings. To benefit fully from the virtual workshop, the user needs to learn how to use official meteorological information. In addition, there should be good collaboration between the NMHS and emergency agencies of each country.
Based on the positive outcomes achieved, we received from the Training and Fellowships Division (WMO Education) a proposal to create a moodle template to enable the course to be replicated in other WMO regional training centres (RTC). We decided to take on the challenge of producing an Instructor guide and course template that would allow replication of the virtual workshop in other regions. In this way we hope to provide a useful resource for other social science trainers working on issues related to disaster risk reduction in the face of hydrometeorological events.
This proposal implied the revision of all the steps of the course, from the initial call for participants, the selected materials, the proposed activities and the evaluation instances. In this sense, we carried out a review of the course that involved improving strategies, incorporating new reading materials and clarifying activities. This review of the course had to be carried out with the understanding that it should be given in another RTC. It was necessary for each part to be easily understood, providing as much information as possible at each stage so that there would be no difficulties.
During this process we were concerned with generating a useful and guiding document to make the course available in other contexts. We adapted to the format proposed in the WMO guidelines and the standardization criteria to make the course proposal available. This work demanded the effort to make explicit all the dimensions associated with the generation, planning, presentation and evaluation of a training proposal. The challenge consisted in combining the pedagogical foundation and the selected resources.
We propose to discuss with colleagues the usefulness of this Instructor Guide and Moodle course template in order to think about the role of open-access training resources and the adaption of training experiences to different contexts. We will also be announcing the available course template for use by other WMO RTCS. We hope to share our work experience and learn about other processes carried out by teachers and trainers in the field of hydrometeorological services. In particular, we are particularly interested in receiving comments and criticisms of the document "Instructor Guide Regional workshops on Hydrometeorology Information for Disaster Risk Reduction: Interaction between NMHSs and Decision Makers”.
