27th EWGLAM and 12th SRNWP Meetings

Ljubljana (Slovenia)

SRNWP Business Meeting of the 5th of October 2005

Report of the SRNWP Co-ordinator

20 NWS were represented:

Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

As every year, the ECMWF has been invited and was represented.

The Co-ordinator has presented his report under the form of an electronic presentation which displayed all the works in progress at the time of the meeting (see http://srnwp.cscs.ch/Annual_Meetings/2005/SRNWPpresentation.ppt).

Agenda of the report:

• The Network of Consortia

• Programme OPERA: Compositing necessary

• EUCOS II (2007 – 2011)

• Upper Air Soundings: Use of the BUFR code besides the TEMP code

• STORMNET

• Model comparison

• Hub for high resolution precipitation observations

• Dissemination of hourly SYNOPs

• GPS Zenital Total Delays

• SRNWP PEPS

Due to lack of time, it has not been possible to present and to discuss all these items.

But the most important ones - placed at the top of the list - have been treated.

The Network of Consortia

The National Meteorological Administration of Romania is next to its full membership by ALADIN also an "Associate Member" of the COSMO Consortium.

Programme OPERA: Compositing necessary

The Assembly acknowledged the creation of a Radar data hub at the Meteorological Office. But the Assembly could not understand that the daily production of a European radar composit has been forbidden by the EUMETNET Council (23rd Council, 14 Dec. 2004).

Radar compositing is needed by the Short-range NWP community for the validation and verification of the precipitations of the meso-scale LAMs. It would be a waste of time and resources if the same work (downloading of the radar data from the hub and making a composite) should be done in several NWS.

At unanimity minus one abstention, the Assembly passed the following Recommendation:

The European Short-Range NWP community asks the EUMETNET Council to recall its decision taken at its 23rd Meeting (14th of December 2004 in Reading) to exclude from the OPERA Programme “any work on compositing” (Point 1 of the List of Decisions).

EUCOS II (2007 – 2011)

The EUMETNET Council agreed at its 11th Meeting (21st November 2000 in Darmstadt) that “EUCOS is the ground-based observing system designed to serve the needs of General Numerical Weather Prediction (GNWP) over Europe”

The aim of the present phase of EUCOS (2002-2006) is to define and deploy a composit observing system for the GNWP.

Considering

- that today in Europe the total amount of money given by the NWS for the short-range, high-resolution NWP (manpower and computer costs for the scientific developments and the operational aspects) is higher than for the GNWP

- that the increase of the spatial resolution of the meso-scale NWP models we observe today will continue and that it is a priority for almost all the NWS to encourage and support NWP developments towards the km-scale resolution,

the Assembly voted at unanimity the following Recommendation:

Considering that the Proposed Revised Design presented in the “Review of the EUCOS Upper-Air Network Design” of 18 May 2005 does not consider the observational requirements needed for the high-resolution short-range NWP models, the European Short-Range NWP community asks the EUCOS Programme Board and the EUCOS Advisory Group to significantly increase the density of observations and to make sure that this density remain sufficient at night.

More generally, the delegates of the 12th Meeting of the SRNWP Programme held the 5th of October 2005 in Ljubljana ask that in the second phase of the EUCOS Programme (2007-2011) the same attention, priority and resources be given for the observation of the meso-scale as it will be done for the observation of the synoptic scale.

Upper Air Soundings: Use of the BUFR code besides the TEMP code

The TEMP code does not fulfil any longer the requirements of the data assimilation for high resolution NWP models: the geographical position of the sonde is unknown and the time of a measurement known only very approximately. Moreover, the format of the TEMP code with its 4 groups (A, B, C and D) is very unpractical for programming.

Thus the WWW Department of the WMO is making efforts to encourage migration to binary based code, i.e. to code the upper air soundings in BUFR format.

The 14th Session of the WMO Regional Association VI (7-15 September 2005 at Heidelberg, Germany) "noted with concern that the preparation and planning for the transition to the TDCF (Table-Driven Code Forms) was not adequate. Less than 50 per cent of NMCs in Region VI have started to develop migration plans. Many Members still underestimate the challenge involved in a migration and also the benefits to be gained from TDCF" (Document APP_WP 4).

The necessary software for encoding sounding in BUFR exists. The RA-VI noted in the same Document: "With a view to assisting NMCs in the migration, WMO encouraged the development and distribution of universal BUFR, CREX and GRIB decoding/encoding software on various platforms to the whole meteorological community. ECMWF was providing BUFR software via free download. The German Meteorological Service (DWD) developed a BUFR edition 3 library. BUFR encoding/decoding software was also offered by NWS/NCEP (USA) and the UK MetOffice as listed in the CBS Software Registry. BUFR/CREX tables and templates for category 1 of TAC data types (SYNOP, TEMP, PILOT, CLIMAT and CLIMAT TEMP) were available in the WMO server".

At the time of the SRNWP Business Meeting, the documents of the 14th Session of the RA-VI were not yet available. The Co-ordinator had prepared for the SRNWP Meeting a Recommendation (see the electronic presentation) whose wording - now that the policy of the RA VI is known - must be slightly revised. Needless to say that the Assembly was convinced of the superiority of the BUFR code for the dissemination of the upper air soundings.

Recommendation:

At the 12th Meeting of the EUMETNET SRNWP Programme held the 5th of October 2005 in Ljubljana, the NWS delegates asked the EUCOS Manager to take the necessary measures in order to make sure that the dissemination on the GTS of the radiosonde data between the European NWS will take place in BUFR code as encouraged by the WWW Department of the WMO and as strongly recommended by the 14th Session of the WMO-RA VI (5 -15 September 2005 in Heidelberg).

STORMNET

This information has been given by Dominique Giard (Meteo-France).

As the Proposal for an EU Project submitted the 2nd of December 2004 for the financing of a "Research and Training Network on high resolution NWP" has not been accepted, our proposal has been re-submitting the 28th of September 2005, again in the instrument "Human Resources and Mobility".

As for the first submission, Meteo-France has been the proposer for this second submission.

The following 13 NWS, all Members of the SRNWP Programme, are participating in the proposal: ZAMG (Austria), IRM (Belgium), DHMZ (Croatia), CHMU(Czech Republik), FMI (Finland), MF (France), DWD (Germany), OMSZ (Hungary), KNMI (The Netherlands), SHMU (Slovakia), INM (Spain), SMHI (Sweden) and MeteoSwiss (Switzerland).

Together they are ready to host and educate in Numerical Weather Prediction 29 ERS (Early Stage Researchers) in almost all the aspects of the NWP technique: surface, dynamics, numerics, predictability, system, data assimilation and verification. Most of the participating NWS are accompanied by an "Associated partner" which is in the majority of the cases an Institute or a Department of a University.

After the presentation of Dominique, we had according to our schedule to close the meeting. The other points

• Model comparison

• Hub for high resolution precipitation observations

• Dissemination of hourly SYNOPs

• GPS Zenital Total Delays

• SRNWP PEPS

could not be discussed, but their description in the electronic presentation (see URL at the beginning of this report) tells the interested reader what they are about.

It will now be the duty of the Co-ordinator to send with the necessary justifications the Recommendations to the different authorities and to push for their realisation where and when appropriate. It will also be part of his work to continue his effort for the realisation of the actions listed just above.

For the minutes:

Jean Quiby