In memoriam, Arlette Rigaud (1943,2000)

We are very sad to have to announce you the death, after a long fight against disease, of our colleague Arlette Rigaud, Ingénieur de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris, member of CNRS, working at Météo-France since 1968. In her scientific carrier, she developed a technique for surface pollution tacking in hydraulic vein simulations, she worked on mass spectroscopy for analysing the onion-peel structure of hail and she became a widely recognised specialist of cloud physics. Later she joined the Department of International Affairs, where she became responsible for the conception and implementation of a specific policy of bilateral collaborations.

For some of you what we will now recall about this second part of her carrier should be rather well known, but we are not sure that everyone understands the crucial role she played in the ALADIN project. Right from the start in 1990, she was at the heart of three crucial efforts that made our common endeavour possible: the search for French financing sources, the link with the official international collaboration structures in meteorology and the "Direction to Direction" bilateral aspects of the official support to the project for each Partner NMS of Meteo-France. Year after year, she dedicated all her skills and energy to these tasks, while always keeping her legendary good mood as the trade mark of the discussions she carried out with NMS bosses, French embassies officials or any participant to ALADIN. None of these people will forget her strong personality and the strength of her commitments. In the world of meteorology and way beyond the sole ALADIN framework, in France like in all places where she imagined and fostered French support, she will indeed remain like someone that inspired very solid forms of respect and friendship.

The naturally fragmented character of the actions she was accomplishing for our project does not allow to immediately judge how important they were. So we hope you'll believe us when we are saying that without Arlette's work the ALADIN project would never have reached the scope and success it has had and may even have collapsed in one of the two or three growth-crisis it encountered.

The efforts she did over the last four years in favour of our project were even more demanding on her, since she had started fighting with enormous courage the disease that finally took her. We remember how disappointed she was to miss the first Assembly of Partners in Paris in November 96 owing to her first heavy treatment and how she spent still a lot of energy on the preparation of the Lisbon Assembly eight months ago, despite not being able to attend again. In between, she had had the pleasure to be a very active participant to the Brussels and Prague Assembly meetings and to see there the confirmation of the ALADIN progress, strongly linked to her dedication.

Please spare a mourning thought for her and keep in memory someone that had an extraordinary willingness to see meteorologists from all origins work together, effectively, truthfully and in the best possible mood! The ALADIN project has lost one of its most important supporting personality.

Olivier Moch and Jean-François Geleyn

Arlette during the OMM congress in 1996 (with Mrs Edith Leblanc)

Arlette in her office in Paris