Mesoscale Alpine Programme Media Package:


The Innsbruck Operations center.


The Mesoscale Alpine Programme’s Operations Center for the Special Observing Period 7 Sept 15 Nov 
1999 will be based at Innsbruck Airport. Further operations bases will be located at Milans Linate airport 
and in the Rhine valley. The Innsbruck Center, however, will be in charge of the meteorological forecasts for 
the project , the large research aircraft with their support crew, the project management and the majority of 
scientists will be found here. For this purpose, a significant effort in establishing the necessary infrastructure 
was made.
The research aircraft (a P3 Orion operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric 
Administration NOAA, a Lockheed Electra operated by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research 
NCAR and a Hercules operated by the United Kingdom Meteorological Office) will arrive from about 10 
Sept onward. For their operation, several tons of equipment, spares and computers are shipped to Innsbruck. 
The aircraft support crews will be housed at the offices of Austrocontrol at Innsbruck airport. 
The flight missions of these hardened crews, who normally penetrate icy weather fronts over the 
Pacific or Hurricanes in the Carribean will concentrate on target areas in the Brenner valley, the Rhine valley 
and the southern foothills of the Alpine range in the area of Milan or in Friuli-Slovenia, where intense 
rainfall events are commonly observed. During these flights, on-board weather radars, sensors and so-called 
dropsondes descending on parachutes will measure atmospheric parameters along and below the path of the 
aircraft flying at around 26.000ft above sea level.
altitude. The aircraft will take off from Innsbruck and return after there mission is completed about 7 8 
hours later . If there are enough suitable weather situations, a total of about 15-20 flights is possible.
The project management, i.e. the Scientific Director, the Operations Director, the Facility status 
coordinator and the Aircraft Operations Support Manager will also reside there and cooperate closely with 
the MAP fore-casters who will help with the decision finding before deciding an Intensive Observing 
Period. Two separate networks have been installedin order to facilitate the exchange of data and information 
between the different groups. Altogether, around 100 workstations and PC’s will be linked together in order 
to ingest, check and process the enormous amount of data coming down from the surface-based, airborne 
and satellite sensors and instruments as well as from a number of specialised forecast models. The end result 
of all this data should be exciting new scientific results telling us a lot more about severe  weather affecting 
the alpine region.
	We also need to care about the more mundane needs of our overseas visitors: Most of the scientists 
will have their living quarters at the WIST student hostel, some are staying in hotels and appartments in 
Innsbruck and the surrounding area. Around 25 Fiat cars were rented and a similar number of mobile phones 
procured to facilitate communication between the operations base and field parties. Connections are also 
established to the Milan Operations center allwoing video conferencing.
	The overall cost of the project is estimated at about 250 M ATS or 20 M Euros, whereby individual 
research groups each had to find their own funds. Austria contributes apart from its own research efforts  
by providing infrastructure for the project, be it office space, telecommunications and project management 
staff. By this international cooperation, invaluable scientific results can be obtained that would be out of 
reach for individual groups or participating states