You all visited the last international Delft-FEWS user days, and you made it a success! Visited every day by more than 100 people from all over the world, it has been inspirational, showing a new way to build a community and caring for each other in challenging times like these.

Inspired by those events, we have organized a meeting dedicated to the growing community of Delft-FEWS users in Latin America. On the 19th of November more than 50 participants have attended this meeting joining from more than 15 different organizations in Latin America.

During this meeting we talked about experiences on sharing data and knowledge to strengthen hydrological forecasting in Latin America. Some of the Delft-FEWS users in the region have shared their experiences through longer presentations or pitches, alternated by discussion moments with the whole group.

The two hours originally planned proved not to be enough! After the end of the official program many of the participants stayed around and joined an interesting discussion on sharing data and knowledge which lasted one extra hour. From our side it was fantastic to see such an engagement from the community. It was great to see how different organizations face similar challenges and could learn a lot form each other, both on the technical and the institutional domain.

After the first meeting in 2019, another step has been set towards a more interconnected Delft-FEWS community in Latin America. Online meeting has proven easy to organize and we all agree it could be done more often. Let’s what 2021 will bring us, most probably more meetings like this!

Check out the event page for more information and presentations.

On behalf of the organization committee

Jan Talsma, Patricia Trambauer and Micha Werner