News from FACT

Peter Parson, ZAMG, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

A first FACT - Workshop in Alpine Forecasting was organized by ZAMG in Innsbruck 7 - 9 November 2001. Participants: Scientists from the National Weather Services ZAMG, Meteoswiss and DWD, from the universities of Munich, Vienna, Innsbruck and Modena, forecasters from the NWSs of Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Slovenia and Italy, from Austro Control and from many regional services in Italy (South Tyrol, Trentino, Veneto, Lombardia, Piemonte and Liguria). Main topic: Limited Area Models and Operational Forecasting. You find the agenda of this successful meeting and the summaries of the presentations on the FACT home page: Not longer available.
So FACT has its own home page now, kindly supported by Hans Hirter and Claudia Schmengler. The part is dedicated to meteorological education and training will be open to the public, the other part (a “forum”) will be used for communication between forecasters (eg. forecast alerts, data exchange). This is very likely to be password protected for the members of FACT. Until now FACT is an informal working group of forecasters and scientists supported by many NWS of the Alps and by the Map Steering Committee (MSC). However, it has turned out, that FACT will need an official frame in future. A fruitful and continuous collaboration of forecasters from different countries and connections with other projects have to be ensured by formal agreements between the participating institutions. Therefore FACT should become an EUMETNET project. At the second meeting of the MAP Steering Committee in Milano Linate, November 15-16, 2001, Peter Binder kindly agreed to help to formulate an official EUMETNET - project for FACT.