Project meetings

Kick-off meeting - Bonn, January 2005

The Project kick-off meeting took place at MIUB from 15 to 17 January 2005. During this meeting the project participants adjusted plans from the first year of the project and discussed the data bases and methodological tools to be used.

Second Project meeting - San Diego, June 2005

During the project meeting held by SIO/UCSD (26-29 June 2005), the project participants discussed the project flow during the first months, and made a special emphasis on the methods of estimation of extreme precipitation and development of the mesoscale numerical models. It is important to note that Prof. Dr. Sergey Gulev travelled for both events being paid by IORAS and that UCSD also made available in the project meeting a young hydrologist, Ph.D. student at the Novosibirsk Technological University, Ms. Svetlana Pichugina, who is potentially a useful project participant. During the visit, Sergey Gulev presented a seminar talk at SIO/UCSD. A special event during the project meeting was the participation of Prof. Walter Munk (the most accomplished and famous living oceanographer) in one of the meeting’s sessions. Prof. Munk highly ranked the project outline and made several valuable recommendations.

Figure 4. Project participants together with Prof. W. Munk during the project meeting at UCSD (San Diego) in June 2005. From the left to the right: Pichugina, Bachner, Gershunov, Ivanov, Munk, Zveryaev, Zolina, Gulev, Simmer.

Third Project meeting - Odessa, May 2006

The 3^rd Project meeting took place at OSEU in the rooms the laboratory of oceanographic observations from May 13 to 15, 2006. The head of the oceanography department of OSEU, Igor Ruban, and the head of oceanographical oberservation laboratory, Edvard Krasnodemsky, also partially attended the meeting; they provided the lecture rooms and took excellent care of the well-being of all project participants. The project participants were from MIUB C. Simmer (NPD) and S. Bachner (YS), from IORAS O. Zolina (YS) and A. Gavrikov (YS), from OSEU S. Ivanov , J. Palamarchuk (YS), V. Pyatakova (YS), and from SIO A. Gershunov. S. Gulev (PPD), IORAS, who could not come to the meeting due to urgent internal institutional matters, took part in the meeting by telephone discussions. As invited expert P. Groisman from NCDC took also part in the meeting.

 The first day was devoted to presentations and discussions about the availability of precipitation data, their variability and trends with a focus on extreme precipitation cases including the discussion of the relation of the project to NEESPI represented by P. Groisman. The second day covered the modelling activities within the project including new aspects in remote sensing for validating model results and aspects of adaptive model parameterisations. All presentations will be installed on the project home page, which will be linked to the NEESPI homepage. The third day of the meeting was concerned with reviewing the state of the project, drafting additions to the project report, and discussion of the next steps including more intense cooperation. The latter has now become possible both on the data issue due to the large and almost complete data sets gathered by the project partners, and on the modelling side due to the setup of the computers provided to IORAS and OSEU by NATO. This meeting has demonstrated that the project partners are now in a stage to effectively work together towards the common goals, in other words the have become a working team