1. Slovenia on the way to join the EUMETCAL Programme

2. Partnering agreement with COMET approved

3. EUMETCAL and WMO: increasing cooperation

4. Working Groups: ongoing activities and plans

5. EUMETCAL courses - news

6. EUMETCAL Workshop - extension of the deadline for submitting abstracts

7. Your articles needed

1. Slovenia on the way to join the EUMETCAL Programme

We have opened the year 2009 with the welcome to Poland into the EUMETCAL Programme. It is now a pleasure to announce that the application of the Republic of Slovenia, represented by the Environmental Agency of the Republic of Slovenia, to join Eumetcal has been accepted at the Eumetnet 36th Council Meeting.

2. Partnering agreement with COMET approved

The EUMETCAL Programme is keeping expanding also overseas. EUMETNET Council has approved the proposal for EUMETCAL to sign a partnering agreement with COMET Program, one of the world leaders in education and training solutions for the atmospheric and related sciences.

So far EUMETCAL has consummated a Partnering Agreement with the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM, Australia) and with the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC): the collaboration has proved extremely fruitful on either sides. The inclusion of COMET will therefore strengthen the already strong collaboration with the colleagues overseas.

3. EUMETCAL and WMO: increasing cooperation

Eumetcal aims at cooperating with other training organizations, and World Meteorological Organization is surely the most global organization to collaborate with. In Europe (WMO Regional Area VI) we see particularly good opportunities in the near future to work together with WMO. This might include running some training workshops or seminars side by side and getting mutual benefit for both training organizations. The discussions on these activities are ongoing, and we see a lot of potential in this new co-operation.

4. Working Groups: ongoing activities and plans

  The EUMETCAL Aviation Weather Working Group (AWG) has recently sent a survey to the National Contact Points in order to evaluate the needs and suggestions of the EUMETCAL community in aviation meteorology education and training.

The answers collected from the survey will help the AWG assess the structure and content of the future EUMETCAL Aviation Weather course, aiming at fulfilling needs and expectations of the EUMETCAL members.

  The Technical Solutions Working Group (TWG) has planned a workshop on FLASH, an authoring environment widely used in creating e-learning solutions related to environmental topics (meteorology, oceanography, climatology, etc.). The workshop in planned to be held at the beginning of December. Detailed information will be given after the summer.

5. EUMETCAL courses - news

  The EUMETCAL blended course "Principles of Satellite Meteorology" is getting towards the classroom phase (Langen, Germany 15-19 June) after an intensive and successful online phase, which has begun at the end of April.

19 selected students from all over Europe (also two form BoM, Australia) have so far actively spent part of their time to improve their know-how in satellite meteorology, supported by an experienced team of teachers. A tough, but also interesting, week of work is waiting for them in Langen.

  The NWP blended course to be held next autumn is getting shaped and ahead we have another promising EUMETCAL blended course covering topics of numerical weather prediction with special emphasis to the operational point of view. The course will be announced end of June. The course will have world-known names as instructors and it will provide the participants with the latest developments in the NWP Applications i.e. on the use of Mesoscale models and Short Range Ensembles. The classroom phase of the course will be held at Finnish Meteorological Institute in early December.

6. Workshop - extension of the deadline for submitting abstracts

We wish to announce that the deadline for the Submission of Abstracts for the Fifth EUMETCAL Workshop has been extended to 31st August.

We encourage you to submit your proposal for an Oral or Poster Presentation. On the other hand you are invited to register yourself to the workshop (deadline 04th September).

Details about the Workshop at www.eumetcal.org

7. Your articles needed

You will find again that this issue has not had input from you readers in terms of articles on your current and upcoming training related activities and news. It would be extremely important to share among the community of readers also what happens outside the specific context of the EUMETCAL Programme’s activities. We do need also your precious contribution.

Thank you for reading,

Alessandro Chiariello

EUMETCAL Training Support Officer

The next issue will come out at the end of September 2009. The deadline for articles for newsletter 03/09 is 15 September 2009. Email your articles to [email protected]