Despite being featured as a very attractive geographical, climatic, and cultural region, the Mediterranean Basin is also frequently affected by high-impact weather. The latter may induce catastrophic consequences with detrimental socio-economic and ecological impacts. Mediterranean cyclones are responsible for a wide range of weather-induced natural hazards affecting a large variety of socio-economic activities. Therefore, there is a growing interest in understanding Mediterranean cyclones and their impacts. This concern involves the scientific community, the stakeholders, and the general public. Many questions are still open calling for extensive research and discussion. Among these, the lack of systematic quantification of cyclones' contribution to Mediterranean socio-economic losses, and efficient and effective communication of information among scientists in different disciplines, stakeholders, and the general public, are complex and currently under-addressed challenges. To contribute to future development beyond the current state of expertise, this work reviews existing knowledge regarding the socio-economic impacts of Mediterranean cyclones with a focus on particularly vulnerable sectors in the region. As a result of this effort, knowledge gaps, as well as the vulnerability of the main societal sectors are identified. The overarching goal of gathering knowledge on the socio-economic impacts of Mediterranean cyclones is to inform decision-makers on the state of the art, thus contributing to the creation of resilient communities in the face of climate change. This is even more relevant in the context of the growing destructiveness inflicted by Mediterranean cyclones, despite their probable lower frequency in future scenarios.

The spatiotemporal evolution of droughts in the Congo River Basin (CRB) from 1981–2018 was investigated using the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardised Precipitation–Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to assess the roles of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. The results confirmed a notable trend toward drier conditions, particularly in parts of the northern and central basin, as well as in the south of the CRB, which was associated with increases in potential evapotranspiration and declining rainfall. Global outputs of the Lagrangian model FLEXPART were used to model air masses over four important climatological regions considered to be the main sources of precipitation in the CRB, and their contributions to precipitation over the basin were computed. These analyses confirmed that moisture in the CRB is ~60% self-sourced; African lands were the next greatest contributor, followed by the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. It was found that a reduction in contributions of the sources prevailed during 53 meteorological drought episodes that affected the CRB during the study period and it could be inferred that a reduction in moisture supplied from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans played an important role in the onset of drought episodes. It was also observed that the contribution of moisture from all sources to the CRB decreased during the study period, especially over the northern half of the basin, where the main humid forest of the CRB is located, confirming the importance of water transport and local hydroclimatological dynamics on the hydrological conditions, ecosystems, and local communities of the CRB.

Ambient air quality (AQ) is an environmental and socio-economic issue increasingly decisive in the sustainable development of a territory. At low density territories of Continental Portugal, a good AQ can contribute to the development of various sectors of activity like health and wellness tourism and organic farming, affecting positively the socio-economic situation. The main goal of this study was to build information on ozone concentration in ambient air for the present and on a climate change scenario. The territory case study – the “cerne do Entre-Norte-e-Centro”–, consists of seven municipalities: Aguiar da Beira, Castro Daire, Moimenta da Beira, Sátão, Sernancelhe, Tarouca and Vila Nova de Paiva. Geographically it belongs to the North and Centre of Mainland Portugal (NUTS II) and the Douro and Dão-Lafões subregions (NUTS III). In this area (151.195 hectares) there is not any station of AQ monitoring. Data provided by the Portuguese Air Quality Network was analysed to determine the spatio-temporal evolution of different pollutants covered by actual Portuguese legislation, with special focus on ozone and nitrogen dioxide. This information was compared with the data provided by Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. It was build hazard and vulnerability charts as well as the chart of risk to the territory under study. This knowledge will improve the decision-making process in terms of public politics. In addition it contributes to an increased visibility and attractiveness of this area, as a tourism destination through environmental differentiation in this endogenous resource.

Weather extremes have gained great attention to the general public and policy makers recently. Extratropical cyclones, frontal systems and atmospheric rivers are central components of weather over mid latitudes. These phenomena are associated with compound weather conditions, including dramatic changes in temperature, wind and extreme precipitation. In fact, wind extremes and heavy precipitation events occurring in the winter over land in the mid latitudes are mostly associated with extratropical cyclones. It is well known that the Iberian Peninsula, due to its location, is prone to the occurrence of these compound extreme events and associated hazards (Liberato et al., 2013; 2014). In this project our aim is to explore the usage of expert crowdsourcing for annotating weather systems associated to compound hydrometeorological extreme events over the Euro-Atlantic region, so automated methods and computational resources can be optimized in a future hybrid approach. This approach allows a sharing of lessons learned and a common design ground. Atmospheric phenomena annotation aims at bringing new dimensions to current big data problems in climate and atmospheric sciences. Today big data full potential in weather and climate science domain is still restricted by the poor semantic knowledge of data gathered and the inability to correlate data with other domains. Acknowledgements: This work is supported by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia – FCT), under the projects UID/GEO/50019/2013 – Instituto Dom Luiz and CMU/CS/0012/2017 – “eCSAAP - expert Crowdsourcing for Semantic Annotation of Atmospheric Phenomena”. Liberato et al. 2013 Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 13:2239-2251 doi: 10.5194/nhess-13-2239-2013 Liberato 2014 Weather and Climate Extremes, 5-6: 16-28 doi: 10.1016/j.wace.2014.06.002

Ambient air quality is an increasingly prominent environmental factor within the sustainable development of an urban territory, due to a growing awareness on the harmful and transboundary nature of its effects. The main objective of this work was to build knowledge on the quality of ambient air and climate, in the metropolitan area of Brasília/DF, the capital of Brazil. The experimental procedure was designed so as to allow the response to this objective: a) appealed to the temporal series of pollutants measured in the existing regulatory network in this urban area, in the last 10 years; and the data from the National Institute of Meteorology – NIMET; b) correlated statistically all data analyzed. We found a poor spatial coverage of the network for monitoring of ambient air quality in urban area. The only pollutants measured continuously in Brasília/DF are respirable particles (PM10), which is manifestly insufficient, taking into account the different types of sources found. In this way, it is crucial to raise the level of knowledge about the quality of the resource “air” in this city to become more effective and efficient management. The information now obtained constitutes the basis for developing an urban strategy to increase the resilience of populations potentially affected by this problem, i.e., aims to guide the process of ambient air quality management of this Brazilian city to enable you to hold (when good) or, in other cases are initiated investigations/actions that improve.