BALKAN-MEDITERRANEAN REAL TIME SEVERE WEATHER SERVICE AND POSSIBLE SYNERGIES

The BeRTISS (Balkan-Mediterranean Real Time Severe weather Service) is a project funded by the European Territorial Cooperation Programme “Interreg V-B Balkan-Mediterranean 2014-2020". Under the frames of this collaborative project a transnational operational service for monitoring severe weather events in the Balkan‐Mediterranean area will be established by exploiting Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) tropospheric products. By exploiting the fact that GNSS signals transmitted from satellites to ground reference stations are delayed by water vapor in the troposphere we can estimate this tropospheric delay by incorporating surface pressure and temperature measurements. Using this tropospheric delay we can infer Precipitable Water Vapour (PWV) which is the most abundant greenhouse gas (accounting for ~70% of global warming). GNSS derived PWV has been utilized as an input to Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models to improve the forecasting accuracy. BeRTISS real-time service, which will comprise the extension of the existing European GNSS network of tropospheric products, will facilitate continuous PWV monitoring over Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus using the GNSS derived tropospheric products over the region. Cloud information provided through projects such as C³IEL (Cluster for Climate and Cloud Imaging of Evolution and Lightning) is considered as an important aspect that can be combined with GNSS meteorology services and enhance the information content that can be provided through the operational platform that is being developed under BeRTISS.