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ALADIN
High Resolution Numerical Weather Prediction Project
Website of the ALADIN Consortium
ALADIN and AROME
Article published on 2005
last modification on 20 November 2008

by Patricia
from

 ALADIN (Aire Limitée Adaptation dynamique Développment INternational)

to

 ALADIN-2 (AROME Limited Area Decentralized International Network)

via

 ALARO (transition step between ALADIN and AROME)

AROME stands for Applications of Research to Operations at MesoscalE. It is a new weather prediction concept from Météo-France that is being developed with many partners, mostly in Europe. By end of 2008 it will provide highly competitive products for fine-scale weather forecasting, monitoring of the environment and new tools for atmospheric research.

AROME comprises a sophisticated new numerical model of the atmosphere, new ways to use cutting-edge observations for improving forecasts, a cooperative development approach that involves over a hundred scientists, and much more. 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: AROME is based on the dynamical kernel of the non-hydrostatic version of ALADIN and the physical parametrization package of the Meso-NH research model.
Of course, there is great interest within ALADIN community to move towards operational application of AROME.

As the AROME software is extremely expensive to run, in particular for real-time weather forecasting, a framework for the transition, called ALARO, has been developed, based on the ALADIN model with a refined formulation of the physical parameterizations.

ALADIN-2 is born during scientific and political meeting organized in Prague (11-12 April 2003) : the AROME-ALADIN (AA) meeting.
Then, a so-called AAA (AROME-ALARO-ALADIN) meeting was organized in Prague on February 13, 2004, with the aim to clarify the views of the concerned bodies and to get some guidelines how to start real work on ALADIN-2.
Between these two meetings, the "Strategic document for the preparation of an «ALADIN-2» project" was prepared by Jean-François Geleyn and discussed within the ALADIN community.

Since 2004, the status and plans of the ALADIN-2 project are discussed during CSSI meetings, ALADIN workshop, General Assemblies ... See meetings for details and minutes of these discussions.