SRNWP Annual Business Meeting 2003

9th of October 2003, Lisbon (Portugal)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We had the pleasure to have at our meeting, unfortunately for the last time, the participation of the Claude Pastre, the EUMETNET Coordinating Officer, who will retire at the end of the year. Claude Pastre summarised at the start of the meeting, the present legal status of the C-SRNWP Programme.

At its 18th Meeting (3rd of April 2003), the EUMETNET Council decided the extension of the C-SRNWP Programme after the 31st of December 2003. At its 19th Meeting (12th of September 2003), the Council nominated for the period 1st Jan. 2004 - 31st Dec. 2007 the NWS of Switzerland as Responsible Member and Jean Quiby as Programme Manager.

1. Information: Status of the SRNWP web-site http://srnwp.cscs.ch

This state of this site has improved during the last 12 months, first of all the pages "Lead Centres -> LC Workshops (with reports)".

For the workshops of the years 2002 and 2003, the presentations can be visualized - with a few exceptions - by clicking on the respective titles in the agenda. Next to each title, there is a button allowing the interested scientist to download the presentation if he or she wishes to do so. The minutes of the final or general discussion of several workshops can be found under "Report".

But this site is not yet what it should be: several pages need to be cleaned up or to be updated.

2. Information: The A-TOST field experiment and a call for OSE's

The field experiment of the A-TOST (Atlantic - Thorpex Observing System Test) "will consist of a two months SOP followed by a short period of data processing before NWP Centres can start their impact assessment studies". For the evaluation of the impact of the targeted observations made in the sensitive areas over the Atlantic on forecast performance in the pre-defined regions in Europe, OSE's should be performed. ECMWF, UK Met Office and Meteo-France will conduct such experiments. It would be very useful if other NWS would look at the impact in their operational integration domain. If their integration domain does not cover the Atlantic, the impact will "come" through the boundary conditions that will be provided by the ECMWF (and maybe by the Meteo-France and the Met Office).

3. Information on the state of the action "hourly SYNOP in Europe"

In 2003 two new NWS started disseminating their hourly SYNOPs: SMHI and MeteoSwiss. INM will disseminate hourly SYNOP next year when its new automatic observing network will be operational. Greece does not make hourly SYNOP for the time being, but this could change in the future. At the suggestion of a colleague, the EUMETNET CO will ask the Members of the PB-OBS to promote the dissemination of hourly SYNOPs.

4. The SRNWP multi-model PEPS

The PEPS (Poor-man Ensemble Prediction System) took a very good start. Already 14 NWS have communicated to the DWD that they will put their operational products at disposal of the Project. The project will start with the precipitations. The Coordinator will write to the Heads of Research of the "missing" NWS to encourage them to participate. The present plan foresees operational status in the course of 2005 for the precipitations. A web site is under construction under http://www.dwd.de/PEPS/

5. More standardisation requested

From the Minutes of the 18th EUMETNET Council Meeting:

"Meteo-France indicated that they would be more interested if the Programme started activities in the domain of standardisation of NWP environment which was a very time consuming effort and where the lack of standardisation made the transfer of codes more complicated".

The Coordinator will not start to be active on this matter by organising a workshop, as one has already taken place in 2002 (13-15 May in Toulouse). He will proceed by bilateral consultations, started with Meteo-France. A first effort for more standardisation could be less divergence in the GRIB codes used in Europe or the construction of filters to easily pass from one version to another one.

6. Lead Centres (LC)

The review of the Lead Centres took place as usual. Some LC made a very good presentation on the present state in their field, as did for example the LC for Soil Processes and Soil Analysis.

The rule that each LC should organise a workshop every two years remained undisputed.

The Coordinator proposed to merge the LC for Verification with the LC for Statistical and Dynamical Adaptation. His reason is that the statistical adaptation often sets on model verification. But this proposal has not been accepted by the Assembly which thought that with the rapid increase of the model resolutions we presently witness, the verification becomes a very difficult issue: how do we verify models with resolutions of few km? This will become a real problem in the future and this problem deserves a dedicated LC.

The Workshop of the LC for Variational Methods will be merged with the HIRLAM Workshop on Data Assimilation. It will be organized by the Met Office and will take place in Exeter (Thanks to Per and Terry!)

Other Workshops in 2004:

- LC for Soil Processes and Soil Analysis

- LC for Numerical Technique

In order to equally share the workshops between the even and odd years, it has been decided to the push the Workshop of the LC for Short-Range EPS to 2005. The Coordinator will inform the Director of the UGM about this decision.

The Workshops 2004 will be found in the page http://srnwp.cscs.ch/Lead_Centres/LC_Workshops_with_reports.html

as soon as they are finalized (dates and location).

6. EU Framework Programme (FP6)

In the course of the year 2003, it became clear that the best instrument to use for a SRNWP proposal would be "Human resources and mobility", although we submitted in 2001 an Expression of Interest for a Network of Excellence (see http://srnwp.cscs.ch/Documents/FP6-ExpressionOfInterest.htm).

The idea is to try to set up a project similar to the very successful ALATNET Project, but on a larger scale, with the participation of all the Consortia.

A discussion took place concerning the best closing date for the submission of a proposal. For several NWS, like M-F or OMSZ, it was the 19 November 2003. For others, like DWD and Italy (ARPA-Bologna), this date was seen as impracticable (because NWS need time to take a decision) and they advocated for the 2004 call.

[This point has been discussed again a week later at the ALATNET Final Seminar, where all the Consortia were represented: HIRLAM by its Project Leader (Per Under), the Met Office by Nigel Woods and COSMO by Jean Quiby. It has been decided to submit, under the coordination of Meteo-France, a proposal for the third call due in November 2004].

7. Next Meeting

Format of the meeting, special topic, place and date: please refer to the minutes of the EWGLAM final discussion: http://srnwp.cscs.ch/Annual_Meetings/2003_EWGLAM_Final_Discussion.htm

For the minutes:

Jean Quiby

SRNWP Coordinator