History of the governance : 1991-2005

The organisation of the ALADIN project changes according to the evolution of the project (see also the history of the project).

From September 1991 until end of 1995, the work on ALADIN centered around visits to Toulouse of scientists of all partners, their ALADIN-related work at home being mostly conditioned by the tasks they had been performing in Toulouse. The number of hours of work shared in Toulouse with colleagues of all origins allowed a homogeneous and united team to be formed.
The main difficulty of the set-up was the financing of the travel and visits. Generally speaking, travel was provided by the partners and the grants for the stays were funded by Météo-France or by French ministries or raised in competitive applications by either all partners or by Météo-France and one partner for bilateral support or directly financed by partners.

With the transition to multiple operational status thanks to a "standard open" code, the situation changed. The manpower involved in the development of ALADIN has kept increasing and covers now not only centralized actions of research and source code maintenance in Toulouse but also deported work in NMS, related to the implementation of local versions of ALADIN, the exploitation of the model outputs, the verification of forecasts and local research developments.
The necessary formalization of the project before its decentralization was completed by the signing of a first Memorandum of Understanding by all partners. It layed down he principles observed by ALADIN since the beginning, the choice of software, conditions of its use by the partners and of membership of, admission to, and withdrawal from the ALADIN "club".
The 10-years ALADIN anniversary was celebrated in Paris on May 31st, 2001 and a booklet was printed.

A second ALADIN Memorandum of Understanding was signed on May 31st 2001 with mainly:
- an enlarged definition of the ALADIN partnership, with three levels of "rights versus duties" : Full Member, Associated Member, User;
- more precise guidelines for the commercial use of ALADIN products;
- stricter rules for the registration of the manpower dedicated to ALADIN;
- creation of a Technical Cooperation Standing Committee (TCSC) of for members (Météo-France, a LACE representative, a SELAM representative, a representative of the other partners), in charge of the routine project coordination. This TCSC was replaced by a 6 permanent members working group "Science and Strategy Committee" during the Assembly in Casablanca (2002) : the purpose of this old SSI was to supervise priorities and co-operation with other SRNWP groups, to follow AROME project and to report to the Assembly on progress of the scientific plan.