SRNWP (SHORT RANGE NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION PROGRAMME)

QUARTERLY REPORT: FOURTH QUARTER OF 2008 (October-December, 2008)

The most important event of the last quarter of 2008 was the realisation of the annual EWGLAM/SRNWP meeting in Madrid at the beginning of October. The programme was compiled by the Programme Manager with significant help coming from the Expert Teams (for their thematic sessions). The programme of the meeting was extremely dense with the following new structure:

- Presentations of the LAM Consortia and ECMWF.

- Review talks about the Expert Team subjects (data assimilation, dynamics, physics, applications, LAMEPS, system, surface and verification).

- National posters

- Scientific sessions (data assimilation, dynamics, physics, verification, predictability and surface issues).

- Final EWGLAM discussion

- SRNWP business meeting

- SRNWP Advisory Committee meeting.

Most of the national SRNWP delegates and the main researchers of the Expert Teams were present in this important meeting of SRNWP. Steve Noyes, the Executive Director of EUMETNET was also partially present in the meeting and he gave a presentation about EUMETNET in general and about the requirements of the EUMETNET Council towards SRNWP in particular. All the presentations and the summary of the discussions can be found at the srnwp.met.hu webpage under the “annual meetings”.

After the end of the annual meeting the preparation of the next year’s meeting (to be held in Greece) started with the compilation of a document, which summarized the most important steps to be realised for the organisation of the meeting.

The SRNWP-I (Interoperabilty) Programme had been effectively started in this period and the kick-off meeting of the programme was held at the beginning of December.

At the end of the year (beginning of December) the EUMETNET Council was intensively dealing with the SRNWP Programmes: the election of the responsible member for the SRNWP Verification Programme was done, the report of the C-SRNWP Programme was presented and some new contributing member was accepted. The UK Met Office was selected as responsible member of the Verification Programme (Programme Manager: Clive Wilson, Deputy Programme Manager: Marion Mittermaier). The Council decided that the Czech Republic can also contribute to the C-SRNWP and SRNWP-I (Interoperability) Programmes and Bulgaria for the C-SRNWP Programme. The report of the C-SRNWP Programme was accepted without any important concern by the Council.