MINUTES OF THE WORKING GROUP ON ALADIN PARTICIPATION MEETING

Held in Brussels on 18^th of March 2001

At the ALADIN Assembly of November 2000 it was revealed that the reports on the participation to the ALADIN project, issued until now, are very heterogeneous among the Partners. A Working group on ALADIN participation has got the mandate to harmonise the reporting process.

The meeting of the working group has been held in Brussels, on 18th of March 2001 with the participation of Patricia Pottier (France), Josette Vanderborght (Belgium), Jure Jerman (Slovenia), Andras Horanyi (Hungary) and Doina Banciu (Romania). The working group has tried to find a solution to the problems related to the reporting process, revealed by the preliminary questions of Andras Horanyi.

1. Definition of the category and the type of the work that could be reported

It was agreed that the following activities are recognised for the participation to the ALADIN project:

1. Direct work with ALADIN, potentially beneficial to everybody (including the direct work on the ALADIN code and administration/networking activity as well)

2. Maintenance of the local applications

3. Development of the interfaces to the other applications or to the forecaster with expected (and reported) feedback

The type of the work can be identified as:

1. Training

2. Tuition

3. Operational work

4. Development

5. Maintenance

6. Administration/networking

7. Validation

It was also agreed that it should be a limitation of the declared amount of the administrative work on the project.

For the daily administration the group considers that 2 weeks is a maximum for 3 months. For this amount of administrative work no justification is necessary. Meteo France has the right to account 3 months-person/quarter as a bonus for all the organisation and administrative work without any justification.

Extra amount of administrative work can be considered but in this case a justification is asked (i.e. organisation of workshops).

Some of short visits (maximum 2 weeks) can be considered as administrative or networking stays, however they cannot be mixed up with scientific work. If for a longer stay there are also administrative duties, these should be hidden behind the scientific work.

The participation to the workshops on ALADIN topics will be considered differently depending on their duration. The 2 or 3 days workshops (see also item 3) will be counted in the global effort at home. Longer workshops (i.e. EWGLAM meeting - 1 full week, in an ALADIN country with an ALADIN meeting and an ALATNET committee) could be considered in the country where the meeting is organised.

2. Deadline of the registration

The contribution registration to Meteo France should be done no later than 15 days after the end of each quarter of the year otherwise it will be considered the respective centre has no work in that period.

Meteo France, after the deadline of the contribution registration, has 15 days to send back to the correspondents all the received material (the data for all the Partners) for crosscheck.

3. Unit of accounting

The unit should be a quarter of a month.

Scientific or/and administrative visits might be declared as stay only if its duration is longer than 3 working days.

The group opinion is that only the real work should be counted for the normal statistics of the ALADIN project. It means that one person could report maximum 11 months/year.

Remark: For other statistics (with different aims) the holidays could be added as a percent of the real work.

4. Concrete registration

• The registering person

The group agreed that only the correspondent of each country could register the work carried out in his/her centre, using a password. The correspondent might send an e-mail to Patricia Pottier reminding for those stays, which are performed by his/her colleagues in other centres.

Remark: It was recognised that the correspondent list remains a potential problem. For each country it is compulsory to nominate a correspondent and to communicate the nominated person to Meteo France, as it is shown in MoU.

• Confirmation of the registration

The summary of the centres contribution (including the category and the type of the work) will be registered using the http interface developed at Meteo France by Jean-Daniel Gril. A copy of each registration will be send back to the respective correspondent automatically by e-mail for confirmation.

5. Registration checking in order to reflect the real work

The each correspondent, who has also the obligation to send a report about the registered work (short description), does the first checking. The short descriptions will be included in the first Aladin Newsletter, which is published after the reporting period.

The next validation will be done in Toulouse. The quarterly validated registrations, from all countries, will be distributed to each correspondent (see also item 2) in order to allow the crosscheck.

The correspondent of any centre can ask more details about the work carried out in the other centres and can send (in the case of supposed anomalies) his/her remarks about a specified registration to the correspondent of the centre involved with a copy to Meteo France. The dispute, which cannot be solved with mutual agreement, can be forwarded to the Assembly of Partners for final decision.

The resulted modifications of the registered work will be distributed to all centres.

The contribution of each centre is fully validated when the relevant reports about the work at home are delivered.

NB. The group has proposed the modification of the MoU (item 2B and Annex C) in agreement with the above items.

It is expected the new rules to be used from the 2^nd quarter of 2001 (i.e. for registration in July), after the signature of the new MoU.