Alertness meeting in March

By Marius Jonassen, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS)

On the 26th and 27th March we had one of our bi-annual Alertness project meetings at the Division for forecasting Tromsø. The attendees included national partners from MET Norway, the universities of Bergen (UiB) and Tromsø (UiT) and the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) as well as one of the international partners -  the Dutch meteorological institute (KNMI).

Alertness meeting in March, here in front of the old Institute for Geophysics in Tromsø. Photo: Sevim Gulbrandsen.

It’s important to meet each other

Meetings like these are very important for coordination and collaboration within the project. A good portion of the meeting was therefore dedicated to discussions in groups, both within each work package (WP) and across the different WPs. These group discussions turned out to be very fruitful and definitely helped in paving the way forward for the project.

Agenda for the meeting

The alertness work packages.

Jørn Kristiansen, our project leader, opened the meeting in Tromsø by welcoming us all and introducing the agenda for the meeting. His opening speech was followed by presentations by staff from our four main working packages (WP), focusing on the topics of model validation (WP1, Morten Køltzow, MET), data assimilation (WP2, Roger Randriamampianina, MET), model physics (WP3, Harald Sodemann, UiB) and ensemble forecasting (WP4, Andrew Singleton, MET). These presentations mainly served as status updates and sharing of thoughts for the road ahead for each of the WPs.

Our PhD students Marvin Kähnert, Matilda Hallerstig and Mate Mile took part in the meeting as well. Their work is central to the project and we were pleased to have them contributing to the meeting and also to see the good progress that they all are making on their theses.

Well on schedule

We are now a little more than one year into the project and so far we are doing pretty well on time. We have already achieved a good amount of what we planned to have done so far and we are optimistic that we will manage to keep this pace also in the coming years.

Part of the Alertness-team on the roof of the Division for forecasting in Tromsø. Photo: Eirik Mikal Samuelsen.