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High Resolution Numerical Weather Prediction Project
Website of the ALADIN Consortium

In this 16th and last ALADIN-HIRLAM Newsletter, are presented ALADIN and HIRLAM activities (national and project reports) in 2020. This Tour ends with a look back at 30 year working together in ALADIN, and in a close and more formalised collaboration with HIRLAM during the last 3 years.
AEMET colleagues, Inger-Lise and Jeanette share with us some memories of José-Antonio Garcia-Moya after his shocking passing in December.
We also introduce a special issue of the (French) journal “La Météorologie†that is dedicated to Jean-François Geleyn, after the symposium held in February last year to pay a tribute to his scientific career.
We announce two new Doctors from Casablanca. Congratulations !
Last but not least, a summary list of upcoming events, planned for 2021, is available.

We hope you enjoy reading this last ALADIN-HIRLAM Newsletter.
Thanks all authors for their contributions and rendez-vous for the future ACCORD Newsletters ...


26th ALADIN General Assembly, 7th joint meeting with HIRLAM Council and ACCORD kick-off Assembly
On 26 November 2020, was held the last ALADIN General Assembly: besides the usual reports and decisions, the GA was proposed to look back to the last 10 years and warmly thanked Piet for his terrific work as Programme Manager of ALADIN. Piet also received a thank you gift from the teams.

The 7th joint ALADIN GA & HIRLAM C decided on the last convergence issues such as the choice of the name for the joint consortium, prepared a declaration for the teams and a press release.

To (virtually) celebrate ACCORD birth, the video "Weather forecasting has quite a history !" offered by Météo-France was presented.

Then, the ACCORD kick-off Assembly nominated the members of the STAC and PAC committees and the LTMs, decided on the MG recruitment process, on the budget and the work plan for 2021.

The documents and presentations of these meetings are available here, with the approved minutes (Minutes of 26th ALADIN GA and Minutes of the last joint GA-C and ACCORD kick-off meeting).

HAC, PAC and joint PAC-HAC meetings, 19-20 October 2020

The agendas of these meetings were mainly focused on the preparation of the joint ALADIN General Assembly & HIRLAM Council, the signature of the ALH MoU and the first Assembly of the new Consortium.
The minutes of these meetings are on-line : the PAC-HAC recommendations have already been implemented by the Convergence WG and the documents amended accordingly to PAC-HAC discussions and distributed to the ALADIN & HIRLAM Directors for their video meeting on 26-27 November 2020.

The ALADIN Directors should have met on 25 of June 2020 in Barcelona for the 25th ALADIN General Assembly and on 26 of June with the HIRLAM Council for the 6th joint meeting of the ALADIN General Assembly and HIRLAM Council.
These meetings took place as planned, but on video-conference format.
The documents for the single ALH Consortium, as adopted by the 6th joint ALADIN GA and HIRLAM Council, are available below (versions finalized on 1st of July 2020 by the Convergence Working Group according to the GA-C decisions):

More about these meetings (including agenda and minutes).


23 June. 2020 : the ALADIN-HIRLAM Newsletter n°15 is published

Looking back to the very unusual ALADIN Wk-HIRLAM ASM 2020 !

30th ALADIN WK & HIRLAM ASM 2020

The 1st visio ALADIN Wk-HIRLAM ASM was held from 30 March to 3 April 2020.
The pdf files of the presentations/posters are on-line and the videos of the sessions have also been added on the meeting web-page (although it would take more than 24 hours to watch them all). You can also consult the exchanges and information written during the chat discussions.

Our meeting (44 presentations in 9 sessions, 15 posters, 2 side-meetings) went well, with very nice presentations and discussions. So did the LTM (minutes are published) and the HMG-CSSI (minutes are published) meetings. However, we did miss the informal discussions during the icebreaker, Ljubljana visit and the diner down-town. We’ll resume that part for the All Staff Workshop 2021 in Ljubljana.

Thank to all of you who joined the meetings. More than 215 persons connected to the meeting and identified themselves, including 6 colleagues from ECMWF and the COSMO Scientific Program Manager. Maximum simultaneous attendance was 125 people on big sessions (opening, DA, system, physics and even 135 for surface), 95 people for dynamics, EPS, verification, applications and closing and still about 80 for the posters introduction and the fog side-meeting.

Below are a few "group photos" taken during the different sessions.


Day in honour of Jean-François Geleyn

Presentations on various aspects of Jean-François’s successful research activities with a pioneering inspiration were given by scientists who have collaborated with him, and also by those who have been trained and supervised by him. The videos, presentations and photos of the day are on-line, together with a nice souvenirs and testimonies slide show.

Strategy Meeting : 3-5 February

This meeting was intented to establish a common set of strategic objectives for the future ALADIN-LACE-HIRLAM consortium. After the presentation and discussions with the experts and the current management of ALADIN, HIRLAM and LACE consortia, the Convergence Woking Group worked on preparing a Strategy document, to be proposed to the Assemblies of Directors at their next meetings in June.

The concept of the ALADIN project was proposed by Météo-France in 1990, with the aim of building a mutually beneficial collaboration with the National Meteorological Services of Central and Eastern Europe. This collaboration was to be in the field of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), which provides the basis for the forecasting tools of modern meteorology. The easy to translate acronym (Aire Limitée Adaptation dynamique Développement InterNational) clearly indicates the major axes of this project at its beginnings.

25 years later, as defined in the 5th Memorandum of Understanding,

The goal of the ALADIN Collaboration is to improve the value of the meteorological, hydrological and environmental warning and forecast services delivered by all Members to their users, through the operational implementation of a NWP system capable of resolving horizontal scales from the meso-beta to the meso-gamma scale and improving the prediction of severe weather phenomena such as heavy precipitation, intensive convection and strong winds.

This objective will be fulfilled through continuation and expansion of the activities of the ALADIN Consortium in the field of High Resolution Short Range Weather Forecast, including:

  • Maintenance of an ALADIN System (...);
  • Joint research and development activities, on the basis of the common Strategic Plan and related Work Plans, with the aim of maintaining the ALADIN System at scientific and technical state of the art level within the NWP community;
  • Sharing scientific results, numerical codes, operational environments, related expertise and know-how, as necessary for all ALADIN Consortium members to conduct operational and research activities with the same tools.

About one hundred scientists, from sixteen countries, each with its own specificity in resources and knowledge base, are permanently contributing to the progress of ALADIN NWP system. They are working together on a modern code of the atmosphere that definitely deserves its proper place between the European state-of-the-art NWP models: 80 Full-Time Equivalent persons in the last years of the project’s life. This code is now operated every day in fifteen Euro-Mediterranean countries, on a huge variety of computing platforms ranging from a PC Cluster under Linux to Vector Computers.

ALADIN consortium had a number of unique successes in the past : for instance, the plugging of an existing physics parameterization in the existing code, leading to the AROME model; ALADIN is at the forefront of the gray-zone problematics with the ALARO physics; ALADIN dynamical core is remarkably stable; ...

ALADIN also allowed to build a high-level scientific team, distributed in sixteen countries that managed to reach the level of the best research centres, as witnessed by the PhD theses and publications in international journals. The General Assembly of Partners, the workshops, the meetings, the newsletters regularly offer opportunity of various exchanges within the ALADIN community.

ALADIN is preparing for the serious evolutions expected within the NWP landscape in the coming five to ten years. There is the ever-lasting question where to draw the line between resolved vs. parameterized processes. There is the question of the efficiency and the scalability of ALADIN dynamical core. There are the external drivers, such as the demands of the end users, and the evolution of the high-performance computing machines. Additionally a serious reorganization of the code is now at hand, in particular within the OOPS project. Besides that, the international meteorological context is steadily changing, specifically with the merger of the ALADIN and the HIRLAM consortia.