1. New members: Slovenia, Serbia and NCAR/COMET recently joined the Eumetcal Programme

2. Working Groups: ongoing activities and plans

3. EUMETCAL courses - news

4. MSC Introductory Radar Course and Flash Workshop: concrete outcomes of training collaboration in the Eumetcal community

5. Eumetcal Workshop: excellent premises for a successful event

6. EumetClass - A new online meeting room for Eumetcal members

1. New members: Slovenia, Serbia and NCAR/COMET recently joined the Eumetcal Programme

Eumetcal community is keeping expanding: Slovenia and Serbia, represented by the respective National Meteorological and Hydrological Institutes, are now officially Members of Eumetcal. The COMET Program as well is since last August an official Partner of Eumetcal.
The expansion of Eumetcal is not just a collection of pieces of a puzzle. A new member represents additional resources and expertise that can be shared within the community. On the other hand becoming a new member makes possible:

 access to the activities of Eumetcal (courses, workshops, working groups)

 possibility to participate in the joint collaboration for assessing and delivering the activities

 access to the material shared by the members.

2. Working Groups: ongoing activities and plans

 The Eumetcal Aviation Working Group (Avia WG) has opened a Forum for discussing the results of the recent Survey for determining education and training needs of the Eumetcal NMHSs in aviation meteorology. Avia WG is seeking for additional feedback and comments in order to plan concrete actions for the activities to be exploited in the near future.

 It is a pleasure to announce that a new working group has been activated: the Working Group on Pedagogic Assistance to Trainers (PATT WG). The PATT WG, chaired by Hans Bauer (DWD) had the kick-off meeting at the end of August in Langen, Germany. The WG has planned a list of tasks to carry out in the forthcoming year and has already produced a Survey which well be soon distributed forward to the members states via the Eumetcal contact points. The PATT WG accounts for eager and prepared members: the Eumetcal community will soon benefit their achievements and activities.

3. EUMETCAL courses - news

The applications for the NWP application blended course have been closed some weeks ago: all the available seats for the course (22) have been filled by participants coming from all over Europe and from different fields of practise. Operational forecasters as well as researchers will populate this challenging course, which account for a group of top level instructors. The online phase of the course will start officially on October, 27th with a kick-off session, but students will be engaged already from middle of October with tutorial session in order to familiarize with the online tools. The residence phase will be held in Helsinki in the beginning of December. Best luck for a successful course to participants and instructors!

4. Flash Workshop and MSC Introductory Radar Course: concrete outcomes of resources sharing in the Eumetcal community

 Eumetcal will give next 9-11 December, in Langen, Germany, a workshop on the basic use of FLASH, an authoring environment for creating distance learning solutions, developing web-based meteorological applications or simply realizing web pages. Do not miss this unique opportunity of learning the first steps in using FLASH with top-level instructors and supported by an efficient learning environment offered by the Deutschen Wetterdienstes (DWD). More information HERE.

As instructors Jarno Schipper, chair of the Eumetcal Techical Working Group (TECH WG) and Training Officer in the EumeTRain project, and Bruce Muller, production manager at COMET: this is a concrete example of sharing human resources and expertize within the Eumetcal community.

 The Meteorological Service of Canada MSC is delivering a blended radar course next winter/spring 2010. The course is intended for operational forecasters and aims to extend the use of weather radar so that its full capabilities can be applied to the weather problem of the day. The course is open also the participants from the Eumetcal member states! Go to the Eumetcal website in case you wish additional information.
This course is another example of sharing the resources within the Eumetcal community since the main idea and part of the content of the course is based on the recent Eumetcal Radar blended course given last winter, which also accounted for two participants from Canada.

5. Eumetcal Workshop: excellent premises for a successful event

The Eumetcal Workshop 2009 is approaching very fast. Registration and proposal submission were closed in the middle of September: a first insight into the received registrations and submitted proposals has revealed the potential for a great workshop. Approximately 60 participants will join the Workshop and an excellent level of presenters, presentations and practical sessions is expected. Among the participants: the representatives of the training department of the Eumetcal member states, including NCAR/Comet, ABoM, MSC and EUMETSAT, representatives from WMO and from several non-Eumetcal organizations.
The Workshop will give the chance to discuss and learn about distance and traditional learning topics and issues, to learn more about the Eumetcal activities and Programme and, the last but not the least, to establish and strengthen important contacts with members of the international training communities and organizations.

The workshop web site is now open here

6. EumetClass - A new online meeting room for Eumetcal members

Eumetcal offers an online collaboration and meeting space for its members. Members can use this space for their training events and online meetings free of charge. To avoid overlapping bookings, the members are requested to book the room in advance.
We hope this meeting facility will be useful for Eumetcal members. Start trying and testing it now - we’ll be happy to hear your comments.
Additional information from the Online Collaboration panel of the Eumetcal website.

Thank you for reading,

Alessandro Chiariello

EUMETCAL Training Support Officer

The next issue will come out at the end of December 2009. The deadline for articles for newsletter 04/09 is 10 December 2009. Email your articles to [email protected]