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The 4th Assembly of ALADIN Partners, Lisbon, 6th of December 1999

Approval of the revised 2nd Medium-Term (1999-2001) research plan for ALADIN :
- Three main topics were focussed: maintenance and improvement of the operational versions, high resolution modelling and data assimilation. For each of these 3 generic targets, the relative importance of themes was established and these were distributed, by priorities, in very/high, medium and long term.
- At the same time, it was stressed what work was completed on those themes during 1999 and the expected work to be done during the year 2000 on: Physics, Dynamics (including coupling) and Data Assimilation.
- The approved medium-term research plan is available on our public ftp.
Commitments for the maintenance : Stricter rules for participation to the maintenance effort inside the ALADIN partnership were accepted :
- The participation of each ALADIN team to phasing must be at least 1 person once a year. It can be more for the largest teams (more than 4 full-time equivalent persons for instance). The minimum size of a phasing team is 8 persons for a full cycle, less for intermediate cycles if any.
- Only one inexperienced person per phasing team is accepted. This newcomer must of course have some basic knowledge of ALADIN.
- An ordered list of all ALADIN scientists will be elaborated. Persons will be invited following this list in "rotation mode", so that everyone will contribute but not very often.
- Each team will send its own part of the list, mentioning constraints if any, to the Toulouse support team. Otherwise the list of quarterly contributions will be used.
- Phasing is centralised in Toulouse since a very close co-operation between ALADIN and ARPEGE scientists is required for this crucial exercise. The stays are usually 6 weeks long, costs may be supported by Météo-France. Deported validation of cycles are accepted as contributions to phasing exercises exceptionally, for technical options that cannot be validated in Toulouse.
- It was also admitted to dedicate 10% of the ALADIN effort on the maintenance. Maintenance includes not only phasing, but also code optimisation and cleaning, code documentation and the preparation of databases for the use of all partners.
Commitments for the ALADIN school on high resolution modelling :
- In accordance with the decision taken during the Assembly, the Directors of ALADIN NMS were asked to commit on the participation of members of their National Meteorological Service to the ALATNET Seminar on "High Resolution" Modelling : full commitments on the number of students, on the previous knowledge the previous knowledge of NWP and ALADIN these will have previously acquired and on their future involvement in the project have been received and the decision to organise the Seminar was taken;
Verification’s project :
- Presently the verification issue is handled in Europe at several levels: EWGLAM (with co-ordination of Germany), SRNWP (with a focal point by the Netherlands) and ALADIN, with no real effect yet. A well running example is the one by WMO on the scores for global modelling, with a decentralised way of functioning.
- The Assembly decided to endorse the following actions:
  - the need for each NMS to nominate a contact point dedicated to verification : the e-mail list (verifala @meteo.fr) contains the addresses of the nominated contact points;
  - start a WMO like, i.e. decentralised, exchange of scores (but using the same definitions and same parameters as in the EWGLAM project);
  - computation by everyone of scores for its geographical domain using the stations recommended by EWGLAM (with special attention of Morocco, not included in EWGLAM);
  - scores sent back to all other contact points.
- If this first attempt is successful, it will open the way to a broader co-operation, at the European level for the exchange of scores, and towards a better co-ordination of subjective verification and the collection of typical situations inside the ALADIN partnership.