The annual MAP Meeting 2003 was jointly held with the 26th International Conference on Alpine Meteorology (ICAM) 19-23 May 2003 in Brig, Switzerland, almost exactly ten years after the devastating Brig flooding event, which not only left a mark on the town but had quite an impact on the formulation of MAP. Conferences on Alpine Meteorology have been regularly organized as bi-annual events since 1950. You may recall that in 2001 responsible organizers agreed that ICAMs should be held in alternating fashion with the Mountain Meteorology Conferences of the American Meteorological Society (MMC AMS). Also, for the next future the MAP Meetings may be combined with the ICAMs and, possibly, with the MMCs, this being the reason for the shift of ICAM 2002 to next odd year, i.e. to 2003 for the first edition of ICAM/MAP. As a matter of fact, the MAP Meeting 2004 will be jointly held with the AMS MMC for the second time, and MAP has already been invited to join ICAM in 2005.
The conference was a good success in a number of ways. The number of participants, coming from NN countries, missed the mark of three hundred by only little. About 70 oral and close to 130 poster presentations provided the scientific substance of the conference. The international programme committee chaired by Christoph Schär did an outstanding job in carefully assorting a very attractive sequence of talks for the plenary session, covering the core MAP subjects, the more traditional, application-oriented themes of the ICAM, and a session on societal impact. Ample time was allocated for the poster sessions, which were held in the large conference hall. Conference proceedings with extended abstracts have been published by MeteoSwiss, and slides of part of the oral presentations are available online at the MAP Data Centre (Presentations). Also, a special issue of the Meteorologische Zeitschrift is in preparation to which some 30 papers have been submitted. As an aside it may be noted that the public evening on Tuesday, designed to present the conference topic to the large public, was appreciated very much by the local population. Finally, the weather assisted the conference excursion to Mt. Eggishorn, almost 3000 masl, very graciously, in that it provided a window of sunshine just at the right time.
