Introduction

This is the second Newsletter in the HIRLAM-5 Project. I am most impressed with the number of people who have contributed and worked hard oved the summer to produce results and write them up. This is of course essential for such a distributed group as the HIRLAM Staff.

There has been interesting progress in several of the sub-projects in HIRLAM. A particular mile-stone is the successful operational introduction of 3D-VAR at DMI, the first one in HIRLAM. The result of over 5 years of development and co-operation in HIRLAM. The direct assimilation of ATOVS radiances has now been carried out with 3D-VAR and with impressive impact. The problems in the CBR scheme have focused the attention at several places and a promising development of the scheme is explained in the Newsletter. It was also shown and discussed with the Management Group Group at their visit to KNMI in September. A report of this and other HIRLAM related research at KNMI is enclosed.

Recently a meeting of the Condensation-Convection group was convened in Madrid (following the Scientific Plan). The Kain-Fritsch convection scheme together with the Rasch-Kristjánsson condensation scheme have been tested and evaluated and showed quite promising results. A special report of these results will be issued.

In the dynamics area, it is reported about work on coupling the physics in the semi-Lagrangian scheme and about 2-dimensional results of tests of different boundary condition schemes.
On the system side, a lot of development has gone in to the HIRLAM mini-SMS, see the last paper in this Newsletter. Please follow the developments of this on the HEXNET and in mail discussions etc. and please try it out and report about any undesirable features. I am convinced that we will mainly see many advantages from using this new control structure. The Reference system has only been upgraded a few times this period, due to the new policy for official releases and the testing effort and also due to a some very large changes coming up. A few physics corrections have gone in. Another one for the semi-Lagrangian scheme now makes it the default option also in the Reference system (although still undergoing tests).

Per Undén, 5 October, 2000.

Recent meetings:

SRNWP/UKMO workshop on Mesoscale Variational Data Assimilation, Reading 8-10 May 2000.
The third MG meeting (MGM3) was held at ECMWF 10 May. The report is on HEXNET.
The HIRLAM Management Group visited KNMI 11-12 September 2000.
The fourth Management Group meeting (MGM4) held at KNMI 12 September 2000.

Forthcoming meetings:

HAC, Oslo, 30-31 October 2000.
Member institute visit and MGM5, DNMI, Oslo, 6-7 November 2000.
HIRLAM Council, Reading, 28 November 2000.
HIRLAM/SRNWP workshop on verification research, prel. April 2001.
HIRLAM All Staff Meeting. To be decided soon.
HIRLAM/SRNWP workshop on surface processes and other physical parameterization, prel. September 2001.