Summary of the 8th and 9th MSC Meetings

Andrea Rossa, MeteoSwiss, CH-8044 Zurich

A NAME="pgfId-1076242">Whereas transition was the outstanding theme of the two 2004 MAP Steering Committee (MSC) Meetings, matters were rather established and conclusive in the last two MSC Meetings, held 22 November 2004 in Erding, Germany and 23 May 2005 in Zadar, Croatia. Most of the items treated received separate articles in this last issue of the MAP newsletter, so that they are only briefly mentioned here. Migration of the MAP Data Cetre (MDC, see also The MAP Data Centre at MeteoSwiss) from ETH Zurich to MeteoSwiss has been successfully concluded. As required, almost nothing of the look and feel has changed except for the address which now reads www.map.meteoswiss.ch! Underneath, however, a redesign of the MDC has been implemented to ease maintenance and so ensuring that the MDC will serve the community for many more years! Whereas this important step of progress was made on the technical level, a final update of the MAP data quality work was achieved (see DAQUAMAP Redo). It provided a coherent update of the quality description on what will be referred to as a frozen data set.

MAP is investing substantial efforts in concluding what was a decade of exciting planning, research, and analysis work. The harvest project, initiated in 2004 and aiming at a synthesis of the scientific conclusions of MAP had a very successful showdown at the ICAM/MAP Meeting 2005 in Zadar, Croatia. Eleven invited overview papers gave a succinct account of the main results of the campain. MSC chairman Hans Volkert promotes this activity and coordinates a synchronized submission of the overview papers to the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteororlogical Society, which published another MAP Special Issue January 2003. Guidelines issued by the MSC will help harmonizing the papers, as will an overview article by Volkert which allows the other contributions to focus on their specific issues. Also, an update of the bibliography related to MAP is underway and available at the MAP Data Centre.

A number of new initiatives with close links to MAP have been started, Indeed, several reports are given in this last issue of the MAP newsletter, i.e. in Part IV: BEYOND MAP. In particular, the WWRP Forecast Demonstration Project MAP D-PHASE progressed one step further in that it obtained official status now (see MAP D-PHASE).

After a busy year 2004 with three MSC meetings, the MSC-9 meeting held in the framework of the last annual MAP Meeting, was thought to be the last one. However, the MSC decided to remain constituted during the transition phase up to the next AMS Mountain Meteorology Conference 2006 in order to have a point of reference. The MSC's responsibilities until then are:

• to supervise the publication process of the MAP harvest project in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society,
• to serve as formal counter-part for the EUMETNET Programme MAP-NWS,
• to follow the MDC migration including the quality control redo,
• to guide the further planning of the MAP D-PHASE initiative, and
• to identify a new committee structure to promote mountain meteorology from 2007 onwards.

Therefore the really last MSC meeting will take place in the framework of the AMS MMC in Santa Fe, NM, USA, 28 August-1 September.

In closing, and on a personal note, I realize that after a solid decade of interesting and exciting work at the MAP Programme Office a most important element of my professional experience is over now. During this period I had the opportunity and privilege to be in contact with very fine and motivated scientists. In particular, the work in the various official MAP bodies, i.e. the CIG, the SSC, the IGP, the MAP-NWS Board, and, not least, the MSC, gave me insight on planning processes on different levels of action. I deem myself lucky that I acquired this experience within a project as constructive and successful as ours. Although at times I sort of had enough writing endless minutes and progress reports of maybe more than fifty committee meetings, twenty newsletters, several annual reports, etc., I am grateful not to have missed the opportunity! Heartfelt thanks are due to Thomas Gutermann for having pushed, together with Joachim Kuettner, MAP real hard and provided for my job back in 1995, to Peter Binder who was an extremely enjoyable and constructive person to work with, to Philippe Bougeault who was a pillar of pragmatic effectiveness, Dick Dirks and Jim Moore for their `magic' skills (smoke and mirror) featured during the Special Observing Period, Hans Volkert and Ron Smith for their friendliness and scientific foresight. These individuals were, at some stage or another, chairing a committee or acting as Scientific or Operations Directors, and thus in close contact with myself. Of course, the MAP community is much wider, so to all of you who made my job so easy and rewarding: thank you!