WEFEX in the Field: What Experts Are Telling Us
Building a useful climate intelligence tool requires more than good data science. It requires listening. Over recent months, the team behind WEFEX has been taking the platform to industry events — presenting it to forecasters, researchers, and decision-makers and gathering the feedback that shapes its development.
Businesses and organisations working with weather and climate data face a persistent challenge: how do you turn complex forecast information into decisions you can actually act on? That question is at the heart of WEFEX (Weather and Seasonal Forecast Extremes), a climate intelligence platform developed by Inside Climate Service (ICS) in partnership with the World Energy & Meteorology Council (WEMC).
Rather than presenting raw temperature or rainfall figures, WEFEX translates meteorological and climatological data into clear risk indicators. By comparing forecasts against historical climate records from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, the platform shows how likely it is that conditions will exceed critical thresholds — and how unusual those conditions might be for a given location and time of year. The tool covers both short-range forecasts for day-to-day decisions and seasonal outlooks stretching up to six months ahead.
To understand how WEFEX is being received by the wider community, we asked experts and practitioners who interacted with the tool at recent events to share their impressions and suggestions for future development.
ECMWF User Forum 2026 – "Using ECMWF's Forecasts"
One of the first major opportunities to present WEFEX to the broader forecasting community came at the ECMWF User Forum 2026, "Using ECMWF's Forecasts", held from 1–4 June 2026 in Reading, United Kingdom. The forum brings together forecast users, researchers, meteorological services, and climate professionals from around the world to exchange experiences, discuss forecast performance, and explore future forecasting needs. The 2026 edition centred on extreme temperature forecasts — including heatwaves and cold waves — and covered forecasting across medium-range, sub-seasonal, and seasonal timescales.
Kristian Nielsen presented the session "Introducing WEFEX: Forecasting Extreme Weather Risks Across Europe" during the forum. Despite taking place in the final slot of the event, the session drew genuine interest from attendees — a good sign for a tool still in active development.
What the Forecasting Community Told Us
The feedback was constructive and revealing. Participants responded positively to the concept — the idea of translating forecast data into risk indicators resonated with professionals who work daily with complex meteorological outputs. Several expressed interest in exploring the platform further after the session.
Sub-seasonal forecasting
One of the strongest messages from participants was the need for sub-seasonal forecasting capabilities — a gap between medium-range and longer-term seasonal outlooks that many practitioners described as critical for operational planning.
Weekly vs. daily statistics
Discussions suggested that weekly statistics could, in some cases, provide a more useful perspective than daily values when interpreting seasonal forecasts — a practical insight that is already informing how the platform presents information.
Most broadly, the discussions confirmed what the team had suspected: demand is growing for tools that make weather and climate information genuinely usable — not just technically accurate.
MEDUSSE Training Course – Istanbul
WEFEX also featured in a presentation at the MEDUSSE Training Course, held on 2 June 2026 in Istanbul, Turkey. The course brought together Mediterranean climate experts, researchers, and practitioners to discuss advances in climate prediction, variability, and climate services. Key themes included seasonal forecasting, AI applications in climate science, extreme events, early warning systems, and sectoral climate services for health, energy, and disaster risk management.
Rather than a standalone WEFEX demonstration, the platform appeared as part of a broader presentation centred on a case study of the recent Rome heatwave. This context proved valuable: participants could see how WEFEX handled a real, recent extreme event — and how it compared different forecasting systems side by side.
Reactions and Key Insights from the Audience
The audience was composed mainly of research organisations with a strong focus on seasonal forecasting. Two aspects of WEFEX drew particular interest.
IFS vs. AIFS comparison
Participants appreciated the ability to compare ECMWF's traditional forecasting system (IFS) with its newer AI-based counterpart (AIFS) within the same interface — a feature that offers direct insight into how the two modelling approaches diverge on extreme events.
Seasonal forecasts at daily resolution
The audience found it genuinely innovative that WEFEX presents extremes of seasonal forecasts at daily resolution, whereas such forecasts are normally provided as three-month or monthly averages — too coarse to reveal short-lived but severe events like heatwaves.
These discussions reinforced a key limitation of conventional seasonal forecast products: extreme events such as heatwaves are typically not detectable when analysing monthly averages, and even less so at three-month resolution. WEFEX's daily-resolution approach directly addresses this gap — and the response from participants confirmed that this capability meets a genuine need in the research and operational communities.
A Conversation That Keeps Evolving
Taken together, the feedback from both events points in a consistent direction: users want tools that bridge the gap between raw data and real decisions, and they want that data presented with enough granularity to detect what averages tend to hide.
These conversations are already shaping WEFEX's development. Recent updates have included performance improvements, bug fixes, and enhanced search functionality — changes informed in part by exactly the kind of feedback gathered at events like these.
The team intends to keep this dialogue going. As WEFEX continues to evolve, engagement with the forecasting and climate-risk community will remain central to its development — because the most useful tools are built not just with good data, but with the people who use it.
WEFEX is developed by Inside Climate Service (ICS) in partnership with the World Energy & Meteorology Council (WEMC). Learn more at inclimateservice.com/wefex.