1. A narrow range of skills in data handling and software development; five research/education institutes:

• It is important to stress that the participating National Weather Services either have a strong NWP research department (substantiated by the facts that they often employ university professors, and have significant experience in training PhD students : to be documented by each partner) or have a very close cooperation with universities on research (substantiated again by the fact that they often employ university professors; that they welcome students for master and PhD theses;and that university researchers often use the state-of-the-art high performance computer facilities available at the National Weather Service). Further more, it must be underlined that research on NWP does not rely on Universities in Europe.

• Because many other "weaknesses" are of similar kind, it does not hurt to repeat this sentence (in different variations, of course) a few times.

• Maybe more Universities should be added as associated partners anyway, even if their cooperation is not fully required.

• It is also sensible to reduce the number of PhD students, from 2 per partner on average to 2 per partner maximum.

2. Complementary skills:

• All participating National Weather Services have contacts with the end-users of their products, in varying degrees of formality. Thus, within each NWS there is extensive knowledge and feel on the societal and ethical issues related to weather and weather forecasts. The ESRs will participate in the service's communications with the end users, and thus be trained in several complementary skills, e.g. communications with users, forecasting, considerations of societal and ethical nature, IPR, of NWP research and applications. This will also provide basic insight in problems encountered in the field of management of research, in particular the distribution of available resources over long- and short-term research, or research aimed at increasing general knowledge versus immediate user wishes.

• Local training to "foreign" languages and culture is to be emphasized, as well as training to communication via publications in reviews / newsletters, seminars or participations to international workshops; "recruitment" is to be mentioned.

3. Some missing partners ?:

• We didn't understand this remark. From the point of vue of the national meteorological services, we cannot see any "big" important partner ?

• Jean Quiby will contact partners from Italy, which may be considered by E.U. as an important missing partner : NMS first, in case the administrative problems are solved, the regional service of Emilia-Romagna together with the University of Bologna afterwards. Spain will also contacted once again.

• Adding more Universities as associated partners is also to be considered in this framework.

4. Interdisciplinary and intersectorial:

• We assumed this will not be so important anymore in the next call. But we may have to re-think this issue the day after tomorrow...

  5. Training organization

• The proposal was clearly misunderstood. Its strengths and the respective parts are to be better highlighted, through reorganization rather than changes in the content. The effort to propose PhD thesis to young researchers must be mentioned, as well as the strong cooperation between NMSs and Universities that should help to the achievement of theses PhD theses, in the host or home countries.

• As concerns the transfer of knowledge, between NMS, between MNSs and Universities, ..., the importance of (widely open) summer schools, publications (internal or international ones), dedicated website(s), must be stressed.

• The initial proposal for the partition of responsibilities is to be detailed, and it was proposed to add a famous experienced scientist (Jean-François Geleyn) as scientific consultant (with his agreement). The following is proposed :

level a : head of project

level b : head of administration and finance

scientific consultant

heads of (thematic) streams

level c : tutors

heads of NWP teams

• It remains to:
  - define the responsibilities of each hierarchical level
  - define how the communication will be ensured (between hierarchical levels, within each hierarchical level)
  - define the kinds of meetings (between hierarchical levels and inside hierarchical levels) that must be established with their respective frequency
  - define the kinds of written reports needed (to whom and with which frequency).