6. Operational versions in Croatia

ALADIN is running operationally twice a day, for 00 and 12 UTC. Model resolutions are 12.2 km for LACE domain, 8 km for HRn8 and 2 km for dynamical adaptation domains.

Initialization of ALADIN on LACE domain is provided by Digital Filter Initialization (DFI). When the 48 hours forecast on LACE domain finishes, 48 hours forecast on HRn8 starts, without initialization, with coupling files from LACE. Coupling frequency and frequency of output files for LACE and HRn8 domains are the same, 3 hours.

In operational suite 5 domains (Karlovac, Senj, Maslenica, Split and Dubrovnik) are used for high-resolution dynamical adaptation of the wind field to orography in the lower troposphere. Four of them cover the coastal part of Croatia. Dynamical adaptation is run sequentially for each output file, every 3 hours till 48 hours.

Changes in the first half of 2003 :

From the beginning of April, the Croatian domain was enlarged from 144x120 (127x109) points to 180x160 (169x149). The domain was enlarged mostly southward and westward to cover the whole Adriatic Sea and Genoa Bay. The horizontal resolution remained the same, 8 km.

Latitudes and longitudes of new HRn8 domain:

- SE corner : 39.00°N, 5.25°E

- NE corner : 49.57°N, 22.30°E

- central point : 44.60°N, 13.00°E

Main memory on SGI was upgraded to 12288 Mbytes, because of more memory consumption by the new ALADIN version, AL25.

Speed of Internet line increased to 2 Mbytes/sec from 13th of June 2003.

RETIM2000 was installed on 16th of June, from that day comparison between transfer speeds and reliability via RETIM2000 and via Internet were performed.

From 30th of July 2003 12 UTC, operational version of ALADIN is AL25T1_op2.

Picture 1. Orography of the old (HRv8) and new (HRn8) domains