The Mediterranean Experiment (MEDEX)

Evelyne Richard, Laboratoire d'Aérologie, CNRS & Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse

When looking back to MAP and ahead to MEDEX it is useful to remember that both enterprises are Research and Development Projects (RDP) under the auspices of the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). WWRP itself developed in parallel to the planning of MAP (cf. http://www.wmo.int/web/arep/wwrp/wwrp_about.shtml) and selected it straightaway it as its first RDP (cf. http://www.wmo.int/web/arep/wwrp/RDPs/map.html).

MEDEX is focussed on cyclones that produce high impact weather in the Mediterranean. Its Phase I (to last until the end of 2005, coordinated by Agusti Jansa from INM) was endorsed by WWRP with the following objectives:

• The elaboration of a dynamic climatology of the cyclones that produce high impact weather in the Mediterranean;
• The better understanding of the genesis and evolution of the cyclones that produce high impact weather in the Mediterranean, together with the analysis of the behaviour of the NWP models in the simulation of these processes;
• The identification of the most sensitive areas in which an improvement of the observation leads more clearly to a better forecasting;
• The evaluation of the societal impact of the hazardous weather associated to some Mediterranean cyclones, as well as the development of verification procedures to determine the quality of the forecasts and the establishment of ways to translate the scientific achievements to the operational meteorology community.

Several instruments were implemented to contribute to the achievement of the objectives above. The most significant of them are grouped in the MEDEX database (http://medex.inm.uib.es) that contains:

• Several databases of cyclones in the Mediterranean area, based on the objective analyses from HIRLAM-INM, operational ECMWF model and ERA-40;
• A systematic calendar of potential high impact weather events (heavy rain and strong wind cases) in the Mediterranean area;
• A list of selected cases with reference to related published work.

A Phase II of MEDEX is under consideration at the moment. It should include field campaign(s) aiming to develop and test observational targeting strategies and assimilation of new observations in order to improve the forecast of the Mediterranean cyclones. Part of these campaigns could be embedded in the THORPEX/EUCOS activities planned for the period 2006-2009 and a preliminary investigation (limited to France so far) indicates the possibility of a specific multi-scale Mediterranean campaign by 2010.

MEDEX clearly has the potential to pass some of the lessons learnt from MAP to the weather research and forecasting community. In this way the aims of WWRP and its large-scale umbrella programme THORPEX continue to remain on the agenda of mesoscale research initiatives. And geographically the link from the Alpine massif to the adjacent sea is a very natural one indeed.