Preface of ALADIN Memorandum of Understanding

Trying my best to speak in the name of all my Colleagues Directors of National Meteorological Services involved in the ALADIN project, it is my great pleasure to preface this informal brochure, prepared by the ALADIN international team in Toulouse, on the occasion of the first Assembly of ALADIN Partners. The highlight of this first Assembly will of course be the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding which will from now on fix the frame of evolution of the ALADIN international cooperation. This signing will be honoured by the presence of the french Minister of Transport and of the General Secretary of WMO.

This is indeed an important occasion for us but, like this brochure, we should try and keep it also a bit informal. For myself I will therefore try not to insist solemnly again on the mutually beneficial aspect of what we have achieved, nor to stress how much dependent on each other we have become in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) matters. I prefer to concentrate on the causes of the success and of the implications it will have for us.

Nearly on the day, six years have passed since Météo-France sent to six other Services the invitation to participate in the project that would later get the name ALADIN. I think it is fair to say that what happened since has fully vindicated the choices made at that time among, let us say it frankly, much scepticism. We are now sure that the decisions to build a truly integrated international team before developing the system, to conceive it as a flexible tool for both research and operations and to rely on the IFS/ARPEGE backbone for streamlining this endeavour were based on sound principles. More importantly we were able to maintain, even with more and more contributing Partners, a strict respect of their implications for a disciplined day to day work.

The luck of the calendar also brings us now two further proofs of the dynamism of the project: the first serial of four PhD studies on ALADIN by foreign students spending half of their time in Toulouse has just been successfully completed (while a new group of five students is taking over); the team assembled in Toulouse is reaching an all-time record number of 28 people (from 12 Countries, France included) this week.

In earlier phases of the project, this dynamism was also one of the building stones when international sub-entities (RC-LACE and SELAM) were created, this pushing ALADIN further towards what we believe to be the most modern form of Limited Area Model operational exploitation: reasonably small domain / high resolution applications with Lateral Boundary Conditions provided as early as feasible from an already high resolution model, the chain starting in this case with the stretched version of ARPEGE operational in Toulouse.

We are going to sign the MoU for consolidating all what we have achieved, but we should surely not believe that the efforts will then be behind us. Our NWP specialists will anyhow tell us how many fascinating scientific and technical challenges are still ahead, this is their role. But ours is to make sure that all the past, present and future efforts around ALADIN will have a durable impact on at least three things: the satisfaction of our customers and clients, through a better use of better numerical products in day to day forecasting; the consolidation of a strong short-range NWP community in Europe and around the western Mediterranean; and a better relation between our Services in all other matters.

I indeed know that the «ALADIN strategy» is sometimes called as example for other envisaged projects. This is quite flattering for us as initiators of the project, but ALADIN was built around a crucial constraint that should not be forgotten: we initially said what we would do and we always did what we had then said, whatever temporary disappointments we may have encountered. If we can be reassured that this spirit would prevail in any other proposed similar endeavour, we are of course ready to explore with you potential new areas of collaboration.

Coming back to ALADIN, I would like to insist on what I consider to be the real originality of our common work. We have placed the preservation and increase of the know-how of NWP teams in all Partner National Meteorological Services at the heart of our strategy, regardless of the overhead it would represent with respect to a more «black-box-exchange-type» approach. The above-mentioned dynamism of the project, its increasing number of differing operational applications and its capacity to attract new Partners accepting the associated constraints indicate that this bet has been a successful one.

But the best proof of the wisdom of our strategy may well be ahead of us. In the world of to-morrow, where distances between working places will become a more and more abstract factor, being able to work in many places at the same time in the same manner on the same code might well be far more important (and perhaps even easier to achieve) than mastering the documentation/customisation process associated with the much heralded so-called «freeware» dissemination of NWP systems. In that sense we should believe that ALADIN is a real prototype for the truly international NWP collaborations of the next century and we should hope that its example will become contagious for other projects.

So it is of the highest importance for all of us to do our utmost to continue on that way and to maintain a good trust within a group from which all of us are winners.