Tasty MAP cakes - ingredients for success

Hans Volkert, Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen

This last issue of the MAP newsletter provides a good opportunity for collecting items which are considered important that the Mesoscale Alpine Programme proved to be a success. This collection is admittedly subjective and assumes at its outset that MAP as a whole was successful. At the end of this article some measures for success are suggested.

In the kindergarten children (used to) sing, at least in the German speaking MAP countries: "Backe, backe, Kuchen ... willst Du guten Kuchen machen, must Du haben sieben Sachen ..." This intuitively reflects the synergy between several (here: seven) ingredients, and also some conservation of quality; in other words: a good cake only results from blending high quality input in an experienced fashion. Let us see whether the analogy holds for the conduct of MAP.

Currently, single realization deterministic events are considered obsolete. Consequently MAP should be viewed as, at least, a succession of two tasty cakes: first, a succulent pie, ready in time for the field phase termed special observing period (SOP) in autumn 1999, which got taste and shape from

1. an experienced guide with vision and persuasive skills (Joachim Kuettner);
2. a bunch of green-horns that got infected (ad-hoc working group within ALPEX-regional);
3. an authority figure with strong institutional grounding and fund raising initiative (Thomas Gutermann);
4. a wide brain storming conference guided by cosy atmosphere creators (Huw Davies, Hans Richner et al. from ETH);
5. a visible programme office (Peter Binder, Andrea Rossa) and an innovative data centre (Hans Richner, Hans Hirter);
6. an interacting set of committees with capable chairpersons (IGP: Thomas Gutermann; SSC: Philippe Bougeault; CIG: Peter Binder); and
7. open-ear and open-purse funding managers; e.g. at NSF in USA (Stephan Nelson) or INSU in France (Daniel Vidal-Madjar).

During the SOP, two tandems of scientific & operations directors (Bougeault/Dirks and Smith/Binder) impartially sliced the large pie and handed it out to the hungry experimentalists by help of their missions selection teams; these procedures were well accompanied and controlled by the MOC director (Herbert Pümpel) and the aircraft coordinator (Heinz Finkenzeller).

At the end of the last millennium the first pie was eaten and digested, but the MAP community began to compose another huge ultra-rich multi-fruit tarte containing among other ingredients the careful analyses of

1. airborne and ground-based radars to work out orographic precipitation processes (Robert Houze, Frank Roux et al.);
2. high resolution case study type simulations with full microphysics (Andrea Buzzi, Evelyne Richard et al.);
3. potential vorticity features, be they low lying banners (Vanda Grubisic, Cyrille Flamant, Christoph Schär) or high flying streamers (Huw Davies, Klaus-Peter Hoinka);
4. unstationary foehn flows through gaps and valleys (Dale Durran, Georg Mayr, Reinhold Steinacker);
5. complex boundary layers which partly influence gravity waves aloft (Mathias Rotach, James Doyle, Ron and Samantha Smith, Dino Zardi);
6. river flows and soil moisture (Roberto Ranzi); and finally bundling them
7. into a special issue of the Quarterly Journal of Royal Meteorological Society (Bougeault/ Houze/Rotunno/Volkert quartet).

Such a two-cake perspective may look pleasing to our senses and aid the growing desire for simple pictures which are easily absorbed, distributed and remembered. The research reality, however, is richer and more complex: MAP certainly was also successful in providing inspiration for the creation of most valuable background information, e.g. precipitation climatologies, enhanced surface observation analyses or the re-analysis of the entire SOP with a global model version of 2002. It also cannot be overstated that the dedication and hard work of a large number of persons constitutes an essential ingredient for the success of MAP, as it is true for any great enterprise in science. The names above are given to underscore this often overlooked fact, while their selection may well be a bit biased.

In general, it is felt, several global measures are to be distinguished for the success of a research programme containing a large field campaign: (i) the input of financial resources; (ii) the output of research articles in peer-reviewed journals, (iii) the educational effect evidenced inter alia by the number of PhD-theses in the different countries, (iv) the passing-on of experiences made to follow-on research programmes, and (v) the transfer of research results into operational applications. As reported at the recent ICAM-MAP-05 conference (Volkert, 2005) such global figures are being collected for MAP. The condensed findings are as follows:

The overall financial investment for MAP comes close to 40 million Euros shared by some ten countries and supranational bodies (as EUMETNET and ECMWF); one third of it was devoted to specified research projects, about 20% was spent for the deployment of large instruments and infrastructure (operation centres), whereas the significant rest was supplied by in-kind investment through participating weather services, research laboratories and university institutes. During the quinquennium 2000-2004 no fewer than 160 MAP related publications appeared in peer reviewed journals. The educational component comprises at least 30 completed PhD-projects in six countries. Experiences made during and after MAP-SOP are being integrated in follow-on programmes as COPS and MEDEX (see the more detailed accounts elsewhere in this issue). The transfer of MAP findings into operational NWP applications is on the way, e.g. within the set-up of the next generation regional assimilation and forecasting system AROME in France.

Several teams are working at present at thorough written compilations of the main achievements made during the conduct of MAP for submission by the end of 2005. We note that such consolidated accounts are rare in our field, but evidently both interesting and necessary for the justification of future joint research efforts. LeMone (2003) revisited the wake which the GATE campaign of 1974 left in the open literature over more than two decades and proved that both patience and perseverance are necessary for working out the effects of large international field programmes for the progress of atmospheric sciences. Exceptional is LeMone's explicit reference to humane aspects of such enterprises: "Even though field programs can be frustrating, we keep going back again. The important thing is to keep one's sense of humor, remember that tired people (including experimentalists) are fallible, and to maintain the experiment team long enough after any experiment to reap the results and answer the Big Questions."

All in all we conclude that the Mesoscale Alpine Programme contained exquisite ingredients which made in a rather successful undertaking in more than one respect. With increasing temporal distance it will become easier to fully detect and appreciate MAP's major and lasting achievements. Then the complete set of MAP newsletters, issues 1-20, which appeared between November 1994 and September 2005, will become particularly useful and help to falsify for the sequence ALPEX-PYREX-MAP the following working hypothesis - sharp, ironic and ascribed to the renowned politician and (less known) Nobel laureate for literature (1953) Sir Winston Churchill:

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm".