The edge of tomorrow: Collaborative operational multi-hazard multi-impact forecasting
Start Date:
Sept. 29, 2026
Region:
Africa, Americas, Asia & Oceania, Europe
Description:
Weather conditions have a significant impact on public demand for First Response Services. In a changing climate, we do not only see an increased frequency of extreme weather and corresponding risks for society; in addition, we see a concerning increase, over multiple decades, of 'risk correlation'. In practical terms, this means that we see an increasing number of days on which multiple branches of the First Response Services experience a risk of high service demand, at the same time.
As such, climate change and associated risk correlation have the potential to erode diversification of First Response Services: Instead of responding to one type of impact on one day, and another type of impact the next day, First Response Services will more often experience multi-impact scenarios, where they will have to respond to multiple impacts simultaneously. The ultimate effect would be an overload of combined First Response services, to the extend of First Response service-denial to citizens in need of help.
At KNMI, in a daily cycle, we run 14-day quantitative impact forecasts for six types of First Response impact. Over the past years, getting here was not only a technical AI/ML challenge. Mostly, this journey was about collaboration: We have built this operational impact forecast in a collaborative process of co-design with First Responders; and we have done so in an internal research-to-operations (R2O) process that was tailored to zero-to-one R2O, instead of the usual incremental R2O process.
