21 NWS were represented.
Retransmission of the ATOVS
data
The Coordinator informed that
his effort to extend to the South of Europe the area of reception of the
TOVS retransmitted by EUMETSAT has been successful and that a supplementary
reception station will be set up in Athens and become operational in the
course of 2003.
Hourly SYNOPs
Plots of the SYNOP messages
at not synoptical hours (like for example 1300 or 1400 UTC) show for Europe
the largest discrepancies: for several countries, the map is full, for other
countries, their map is totally void of SYNOPs. As the importance of hourly
SYNOPs is increasing for verification purposes (validation of the daily cycle)
and for assimilation (first of all for the continuous assimilation schemes),
the Coordinator will write to the NWS which do not disseminate their SYNOPs
hourly.
Lead Centre for LAM EPS
The Madrid Workshop on LAM-EPS
organised at the initiative of the INM (3-4 October 2002) has been a success.
The participants have proposed during the final discussion that such meetings
should be organised on a regular basis. The Coordinator proposed to host
these meetings in the frame of the EUMETNET SRNWP Programme. He asked the
NWS which are interested to become the Lead Centre (LC) for "Short-range
EPS" to announce their candidature till the end of the year to the Coordinator.
If no candidature is received till December the 31st, the Coordinator said
that Switzerland will exert this function, because a LC is needed to assure
the continuity of this activity.
Short-range multi model EPS
In the frame of its "Aktionsprogramm
2003", the DWD offered to organise an operational Multi-Model EPS (MM-EPS)
for the short-range. It is intended to start with the precipitations. This
programme should be realised in 2003 and the NWS will receive from the Coordinator
a letter asking them whether they want to participate. This MM-EPS should
be based only on operational products and, in this way, cause no supplementary
work to the participating NWS: they will only have to send their operational
precipitation maps in GRIB format to the DWD.
Hourly frame from the ECMWF
Switzerland asked whether the
NWS intending to use the ECMWF frames as boundary conditions for their LAMs
would be interested to receive these frames on an hourly basis instead of
with a 3 hour frequency as planed by the ECMWF. No NWS has shown interest.
The HIRLAM Project Leader mentioned that an hourly frequency would pose a
severe telecommunication problem.
ODB (Observation Data Base)
ODB is a
new data base software developed at the ECMWF for the archiving and
the retrieval of the observations. Meteo-France is very interested by this
software and would like to test it. But the documentation is very poor and
the support by the ECMWF very weak. The ECMWF Representative (Anton Beljaars)
told the Assembly that this software is new and its use outside ECMWF not
foreseen. The HIRLAM Project Leader is also interested: it could be an option
for the future. Anton will ask the ECMWF and inform the Coordinator. This
latter will relay this information to the participants.
Framework Programme 6 of the
European Union (FP6)
Coordinator of the SRNWP Network