Report 2005-qrt4: October - December

Annual Meeting 2005

The most important event of this quarter has been the Annual Meeting which took place in Ljubljana from the 3rd to the 5th of October, perfectly organised by the Environmental Agency of the Republic of Slovenia. 20 NWS were represented.

All the information about that meeting (agenda, national posters, scientific presentations, reports of the lead centres, report of the SRNWP business session, list of participants) can be found in the website of the Programme (see Programme).

The main result of this meeting is: a new format for the EWGLAM/SRNWP Annual Meetings has beendefined. The aim of the new format is to bring out thank to a strictlystructured agenda and more discussions the possibilities of collaborationbetween NWS belonging to different Consortia and between the Consortiathemselves.

Three resolutions have been passed:

• one concerning the Programme OPERA: necessity ofcompositing work at the radar data hub (the present situation shows that thisrequirement will be satisfied)
• one concerning the necessity for the EUCOS Programme tonot only consider the needs of the general NWP - i.e. the NWP on the synopticscale - but also the high resolution NWP
• one concerning the use of the BUFR code for thedissemination of the upper sounding data.

Conferences and Workshops

The 6th SRNWP Workshop on Nonhydrostatic Modelling

(31 Oct. - 2 Nov.) took place in Bad Orb (Germany) organised by the DWD. About 70 scientists attended the Workshop, but only 10 European NWS were represented, together with a very strong delegation from Japan and 3 scientists from the USA. Many participants came from German universities.

PEPS

The 3rd of November, the Programme Manager had a discussion at the DWD with the PEPS team.

The pre-operational phase computes probabilistic forecasts for several parameters 4 times a day. The models of 20 European NWS are used, which makes this project - in terms of number of models - very probably the largest multi-model ensemble forecasting system in the world.

The production has reached a very high degree of reliability. Unfortunately, the development of the method (calibration, verification) is slow due to lack of manpower.

Enhanced cooperation in NWP in Europe

Following the document 'A vision for NWP in Europe' written by the former Chief Executive of the Met Office, Dr. David Rogers, a scoping meeting took place the 24th of November in Exeter. This meeting prepared the '2006 NWP Meeting' (see below)

OUTLOOK January - March 2006

EUMETSAT SAF for Land Surface Analysis

This SAF will hold its Second Workshop the 8th-10th of March at the headquarters of the Instituto de Meteorologia in Lisbon. The organisers have asked the Programme Manager to present the state of the use of the satellite information in Europe for the determination of the surface parameters in the NWP models.

2006 NWP Meeting

This meeting will be kindly hosted by the ECMWF the 15-17 March. The Programme Manager will hold a talk on 'Topics for possible collaboration'. Among others: poor-man ensembles, better data dissemination, homogenisation of formats (GRIB!), larger use of BUFR, forecasts on a common format, interface for exchange of  post processing packages.