At its Sixteenth Session meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates from 12 to 16 February 2017, the Regional Association II (Asia) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) agreed to establish a Pilot Project to Enhance the Capability of Meteorological Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in RA II. The aims of the Pilot Project are to:

(i) establish a regional meteo-alarm system, based on implementation of CAP and experience in hosting the WWIS and SWIC websites of WMO;

(ii) promote experience sharing among National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) in RA II in DRR and to organize related training courses; and

(iii) provide assistance to relevant RA II Members to improve their operational capability in meteorological DRR.

In this connection, a public-facing website was set up to display warnings and alerts prepared in Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) format from RAII Members. In CAP, the severity of an alert is categorized into “Extreme”, “Severe”, “Moderate”, “Minor”, and “Unknown”. To enable the alerts to be viewed and searched easily, the CAP alerts are highlighted in different colours on map according to ISO 22324. The colour serve as visual effect to facilitate viewing and searching and are not related directly to the alerts and warnings. To promote experience sharing among Members in RAII in DRR, an intranet (login required) was set up to include products on model, satellite, tropical cyclone forecasts, probabilistic and ensemble forecasts. In addition, a chatroom function is provided to facilitate discussion among NMHSs on weather events that are of common concern.