Dr. Ivan Obrusník, Director of Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (CHMI), opened the meeting. In his address he welcomed all participants to CHMI and stressed the key role of ALADIN in the activity of the Czech weather service.
The Agenda of the meeting was adopted as proposed.
Dr. Radmila Bubnová presented the history and the current status of ALADIN/LACE operational application which had recently moved from Toulouse to Prague, the changes in the structure of RC LACE and the prospect for its scientific and operational activities.
In the discussion the Austrian delegate acknowledged the effort of Czech and French scientific and technical staff aiming to the successful migration of ALADIN/LACE. The Czech representative also stressed a key role of the French support in the whole action.
Jean-François Geleyn presented the assessment of the ALADIN Project development in 1998, its current status, present problems and challenges in both operational and scientific activities.
In the discussion the Czech representative emphasised his satisfaction of witnessing the onset of a new generation of ALADIN developers but the rapporteur expressed the wish that these new people should not be transferred as quickly to non-NWP tasks as it was the case for the first generation and that even some sharing of responsibilities would allow the latter to come back a bit more to research coordination tasks for ALADIN.
The French representative suggested that it might be useful to set up a formal structure for post-processing and graphical applications of ALADIN which were not covered by the ALADIN MoU. The idea was also supported by the Czech representative.
Olivier Moch presented the draft of Agreement between ECMWF and Météo-France.
In the discussion the delegate from France emphasised the link of the Agreement to the ALADIN MoU (Appendix E of the latter being in fact the Agreement itself) since it regulates an access of those countries which are neither full nor associated (co-operative) Members of ECMWF to the ECMWF-born parts of ALADIN software. The Czech delegate expressed his support to such an arrangement since becoming either full or associated member of ECMWF was a difficult and long-term task. It was finally decided to declare the agreement of ALADIN Partners with the presented document.
The discussion on proposed amendments was regulated by the Chairman.
· All minor amendments were approved by the Assembly.
· Regarding the two possible options in chapter 4, paragraph C, dealing with the access to ALADIN code for institutions which were neither ALADIN participating Partners, nor from an ECMWF Member, nor from an ECMWF Co-operating country, most of representatives (account being also taken of the written opinions of non-attending Partners: Bulgaria, Moldavia and Morocco) preferred the option C1 while those preferring C2 did not expressed a strong dislike to C1. It was therefore decided to use option C1 (no rule of exception but regulation of new problems by the amended mechanism for full adhesion) in the updated MoU, bearing in mind the possibility to further modify the MoU within the remaining two years of its validity, if necessity required it.
· Following a proposal by the Portuguese delegate, the case of code benchmarking was specifically added to the non-dissemination and restricted-use rules in chapter 5, paragraph C.
· In the course of the discussion on the reporting of deported work it was suggested that a ceiling for ''implicitly admitted ” home contributions (within the guidelines of Paragraph 2B of the MoU) should be established. The ceiling was proposed as two persons plus the double of the ``away'' work in Toulouse and Prague on average over the last year. Any overstepping of this ceiling should be justified by a full written report on the results within the relevant year of the relevant home work and on its significance for the whole of the project. It was finally decided not to include this policy in the MoU but the intention was expressed to find an acceptable formulation till the next Assembly in 1999; in the meantime some strengthening of the existing rules (for instance applying strict deadlines and using single contact points) were introduced in Appendix C of the MoU. The creation of a third category of work for reporting (''Prague-LACE” in addition to ''Toulouse” and ''Home”) was also agreed upon.
· The discussion on amendments of Appendix D of the MoU regarding the regulations of the access to additional data and products induced a discussion on the dissemination of ALADIN products via Internet and its conformity to the Resolution 40 of the 12th WMO Congress. The importance of the issue and the need of its permanent monitoring was emphasized since in principle all ALADIN products have the nature of additional data. The Hungarian representative emphasised an urgent need of an ALADIN data policy document till the next Assembly with potential MoU modifications as outcome; this proposal was approved and the MoU left unchanged in the meanwhile.
· Since the work of the ALADIN community had been officially recognised by ECMWF and decisions of ALADIN Partners carried information for ECMWF it was decided to invite an ECMWF observer to the next Assemblies and this was registered in the updated MoU.
· It was further decided to allow dissemination of the new ALADIN MoU also among the ECMWF Members, if requested.
The lecture was given by Dr. Radmila Bubnová.
The ensuing discussion remained inconclusive concerning the priorities this type of work should receive inside the ALADIN scientific community.
The overview was presented by Emmanuel Legrand.
The need for local observation data bases for both data assimilation and model verification was stressed. In the discussion the 4-runs-per-day issue was considered including the cost consequences. The representative of Romania announced their plans to increase the resolution of ALADIN/RO to 10 km with possibility of 4 runs per day, for which he asked the lateral boundary conditions.
The lecture was given by Mark Žagar.
The discussion showed approval for the proposed exchanges of information about existing or planned activities but the choice of mechanisms was postponed to the discussion about the scientific plan. The diagnostics of the rapporteur about reasons for duplicated work met approval but no concrete solution emerged for avoiding them in the future.
The topic was introduced by Dominique Giard.
In the discussion it was noted that the current tendency of shortening the Toulouse stays duration to 1.5 months or less was undesirable for an efficient team work. The importance of new practices for meeting the challenges of the forthcoming years was recognised with the hope that, like for the now solved ” training crisis”, self-regulation by awareness of problems would help to find solutions.
The lecture was given by András Horányi.
In the discussion the big difference in the cost of 3DVAR and 4DVAR was emphasised. The consequences on the split of the data assimilation work between diagnostic and prognostic aims was stressed but no real consensus priority could be found. The obvious shift of interest towards data assimilation issues in general was nevertheless recognised and the rapporteur proposed (for the next Assembly?) a redefinition of the (left unchanged) ALADIN acronym ''Assimilation de Données” replacing '' Adaptation Dynamique”.
The introduction to the discussion was given by Jean-François Geleyn.
The representative of Portugal stated the full support to the Scientific plan of his team together with their commitment to continue to be a stable member of ALADIN community. There were no new people in their Institute but they could increase the amount of deported work.
RC LACE Project Leader reminded that the remote work was possible but useful only to some extent. People coming to Toulouse had been more dedicated to the work since they were not charged by their home institutes by local tasks. It was stated that it was a general fact that people returning from Toulouse were usually going to fully change their work to new topics even when still working for ALADIN and that this was not ideal for the overall efficiency of the use of the project's manpower.
The representatives of Austria, Hungary, Czech republic and Belgium also expressed their support to the Scientific plan but it was the general feeling that there were not enough information on impact of the plan on means. Parallely the need for a verification effort (including if possible some comparative results like the ones about global modelling presented earlier by E. Legrand) that would be more streamlined and more user-need oriented than up to now was stressed.
It was therefore decided to approve only the objectively scientific part of the plan and to set up a steering group which would extract implications of the Scientific plan eligible for political decisions. It was proposed that the group consisting of representatives of Météo-France, RC LACE and non-LACE countries (probably Morocco with the backup of Romania for the start) should meet within next 7 months with the aim of possible revision of the executive summary and to start acting as a transversal coordination body for the ALADIN programme of work.
Having collected all commitments for 1999 it was noted with satisfaction that it gave a good perspective of steady continuation of the project in the next year, especially since 1998 overoptimistic goals (that could not be met) were obviously corrected: the 1999 commitments correspond well to the 1998 achievements.
The presentation of the status of the new telecommunication network of WMO Regional Association VI was given by Emmanuel Legrand.
In the discussion some concern of the Croatian representative whether the choice of a unique provider was not in contradiction with the anti-monopoly regulations of the European Union was expressed. It was explained that it was not the case since the selection of the future provider was going to be a result of a very complex tendering and evaluation process carried out in a highly competitive environment with the active participation of all RA-VI Members in the evaluation.
The representative of Portugal kindly offered that the next Assembly would take place in the end of November or beginning of December 1999 in Lisbon.
Vladimir Ivanovici, the representative of Romania, informed about the next ALADIN workshop with the title ''Scientific development and new applications of the numerical weather prediction model ALADIN'' to be held on 15-17 February 1999 in Bucharest, Romania.
Olivier Moch gave an informal presentation on the news concerning the "WMO-Cg Resolution 40". He informed about the background of the current activity of the Meteorological Service of the U.S.A. aiming to provide all meteorological data freely on the Internet and the strong opposition of a number of European weather services to this act. There had been a lot of activity in this regard trying to postpone the American plans and/or to find an adequate European reaction since this act might represent a big danger to European weather services which are forced by their governments to commercialise some of their activities. There were two possible courses of action:
· since NCEP was obliged to provide the American scientific community with the European additional data, these data would not be sent there any more and NCEP would not be obliged to provide them any more, or
· the European additional data would be available on Internet under password so that it would be insured that those data would be available to registered users with scientific or educational aims only.
It was mentioned that the current problem was not only a single problem of access to meteorological data but links to a general tendency of United States to try and export their way of work in the meteorological field.
The session was closed by the addresses of Ivan Obrusník and Olivier Moch.