A framework for joint verification and evaluation of seasonal climate services across socio-economic sectors

Assessing the information provided by co-produced climate services is a timely challenge given the continuously evolving scientific knowledge and its increasing translation to address societal needs. Here we propose a joint evaluation and verification framework to assess prototype services that provide seasonal forecast information based on the experience from the H2020 CLARA project. The quality and value of the forecasts generated by CLARA services were firstly assessed for five climate services utilizing the Copernicus Climate Change Service seasonal forecasts and responding to knowledge needs from the water resources management, agriculture, and energy production sectors. This joint forecast verification and service evaluation highlights various skills and values across physical variables, services and sectors, as well as a need to brigde the gap between verification and user-oriented evaluation. We provide lessons learnt based on the service developers’ and users’ experience, and recommendations to consortia that may want to deploy such verification and evaluation exercises. Lastly, we formalize a framework for joint verification and evaluation in service development, following a transdisciplinary (from data purveyors to service users) and interdisciplinary chain (climate, hydrology, economics, decision analysis).