The Regional Focus Group / Community of Practice Came in Handy When the Pandemic Hit

Abstract:

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has supported the Virtual Laboratory for Education and Training (VLab) since 2000. One of the training activities promoted early on was conducting regular virtual sessions to continue and expand upon in person training. For WMO Regional Associations in the Americas and the Caribbean, these were initiated in 2004, took the form of monthly bi-lingual (English and Spanish) climate and weather discussions, were coordinated among NOAA and WMO Regional Training Centers of Excellence (CoEs) and were called Regional Focus Group (RFG) Sessions. The sessions connect instructors, researchers, forecasters, weather enthusiasts and others to enable them to view geostationary and low earth orbiting imagery and products, and to share information on weather patterns, hurricanes, severe weather, flooding, volcanic eruptions, and other significant events. After 15 years of activity, we paused to reflect on our activities and discovered we had a community of practice. We started to reflect on how to encourage continuing professional development and how to expand to reach other disciplines and areas of interest such as communicating the forecast to partners. Then the pandemic hit. Because of our extensive experience, we were able to adapt to a rapidly expanded audience and continue to offer the regular RFG sessions as well as additional single topic sessions. Our April through early July participation increased more than 800% over participation during January through March. The combined sessions reached over 750 participants from 42 countries. They brought out the importance of having a foundation of trust, collaboration, and a community of support. We are now in the process of converting in-person training to virtual training and we anticipate increased use of virtual training in the next year. We are encouraged by feedback and communication among partners and participants and the willingness to continue to both work together and build capacity in the Regions. In this presentation, we will give a brief overview of the RFG, reflect on some of the experiences that we encountered, and offer some new perspectives on best practices for virtual training.