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AROME-ALADIN special workshop,
April 11-12, 2003, Prague
AROME is a Météo-France
project aiming to design a NWP LAM of very high resolution (2-3 km)
within 2010, "as far as possible in cooperation with ALADIN
partners". The ALADIN non-hydrostatic dynamics (and the ALADIN
source code) was chosen as the starting point for AROME. A report,
issued from CSSI discussions, was sent to Directors and a dedicated
scientific+political workshop has been organized in Prague (11-12
April).
The main conclusions are
presented above whereas all
documents and presentations can be found here.
Main conclusions of the AROME-ALADIN special
workshop, Prague, 11-12th of April 2003
The summing up just
below partly tries to address the extensive list of questions of
Appendix 2. The
main executive conclusion is the one described in Appendix
1.
Name
: For the time being the convergence between the ALADIN
and AROME projects keeps the ALADIN name in its second acronym as
proposed by Claude Fischer (AROME Limited Area Decentralised
International Network), ALADIN-2 in slang to avoid confusion. AROME
remains the name of the 2.5km target project and any ‘ALADIN-2’
declination around the two roots will have to choose its own
specific name. In any case the ‘Consortium’ should still
be named ALADIN.
Performances : It
was agreed to include the question of the compromise level of
optimisation in the ones to be treated in the ’basic’
document (see Appendix
1). Independently of this more evolutive aspect, the basic cost
of the 10-km version, mainly linked to its time-stepping length will
be part of its design specification, be it only because it could
become a convenient vehicle for forthcoming LAM-EPS applications, if
cheap enough.
Capacities : Only
the manpower aspect was treated at that stage. It was evaluated that
the first transition period could be of the order of 3 years if an
additional ‘hill’ could be afforded before a return to
the current level, at ‘unchanged use’. If the additional
possibilities offered by the AROME side of the programme would then
lead to new ambitions in several of the Partners home effort, this
would lead to another more permanent increase, but this was
considered to be off the ‘convergence’ issue. The level
of the hill was estimated not to exceed 15% of the current effort,
if well coordinated. The length of the second transition period
(before everyone could afford using the nominal AROME version) was
not mentioned again, but for the fact that it would fluctuate from
Partner to Partner, while it was essential that the first length
would be homogeneous at +/- 3 months. Météo-France
indicated that Jean-François Geleyn would be made available
for a three year period in Prague to work on the convergence issue,
as seen from the side of Météo-France’s
Partners.
MoU : Given
the welcome coincidence between the end of the ALADIN and RC LACE
MoUs at a time when the convergence ought to be achieved if ever, it
appeared very logical not to touch the current legal structures, but
simply to use them as such to mobilise the additional networking
forces needed for a success around the turn of 2005-2006. Since the
matter is however of long-term crucial importance, it was
anticipated that the Krakow Assembly of Partners of October 2003
would create a task force in charge of all the relevant MoU issues
and that the Assembly of 2004, to be hosted by Croatia, would rather
take the form of a 3 days gathering at political level to anchor all
the legal and economic aspects of ‘ALADIN-2’. In
particular the questions of possibly setting a secretariat and/or a
light legal structure were mentioned. Dijana Klaric was tentatively
put in charge of coordinating the whole process.
Plan for the
transition : A resolution tasked Jean-Francois Geleyn with
preparing for the end of June a complete draft document about all
but the legal and economical aspects of ‘ALADIN-2’ (see
Appendix 1).
Joze Roskar will be his correspondent for gathering and synthesising
the response of all Directors to this draft, so that a more
elaborated version can be put on the table of the Krakow Assembly.
It was therefore stressed that a representation of all Partners at
the directorial level in Krakow was of utmost importance. In case of
important difficulties an intermediate meeting would have to be
conveyed during summer. Jean-Francois Geleyn asked and got
permission to already partly anticipate a success of the process and
to start mobilising the networking means that a ‘seeding
budget’ made available by Météo-France would
allow. It was however expected that other sources would eventually
come from other Partners and/or the usual external channels on which
the ALADIN financing was based up to now. A first response was
brought by an RC LACE proposal to finance additional stays in
Toulouse this year to help the physics interfacing work of Sylvie
Malardel and Yann Seity.
The long-term
scientific strategy : It was decided to create a group in
charge of the long-term scientific watch, of the selection of themes
that are vital either because representing our strengths or because
too important to be neglected in such a prospective effort. The
group will combine the forces of the AROME project leader (François
Bouttier), of the CSSI and of the LSMG in their present composition
(12 people on total, see nominative list below=> (*)). Andras
Horanyi was tentatively charged with the coordination of this new
action, on time scales comparable with those of the MoU issue.
Other aspects :
Defence (at NATO level?) and training aspects were added to
the scope of the possible ALADIN-2 ambitions and, for the latter, it
was stressed that the publicising effort should start as early as
possible. The need for a bit of specialisation of the demo and beta
testing was emphasised, since this could help having a shortened and
more successful period of additional efforts.
(*) Doina Banciu,
Gergely Bölöni, Francois Bouttier, Radmila Brozkova, Claude
Fischer, Luc Gérard, Dominique Giard, Thomas Haiden, Andras
Horanyi, Dijana Klaric, Abdallah Mokssit, Petra Smolikova.
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