While hydromet services provide a foundational role for economic prosperity and resilient development, many countries face substantial challenges in delivering them. To more effectively support countries to address these challenges sustainably, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and major development and climate finance partners created the Alliance for Hydromet Development. The Alliance was launched at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) 25 in 2019, and aims at uniting and scaling up efforts to close the capacity gap in the provision of high-quality weather forecasts, early warning systems, and climate information.

The Alliance has prioritized three activities for early collective action:
First, deploying a common tool to benchmark and assess countries’ hydromet capacity gaps – the Country Hydromet Diagnostics; second, creating an innovative mechanism to finance developing country surface-based weather and climate observations – the Systematic Observations Financing Facility; and third, producing a regular Hydromet Gap Report to track progress on closing the hydromet capacity gap – this is the first such report.