Progress in the atmospheric sciences during the past ten years: What did MAP contribute?

Ten years ago an international workshop was convened at ETH Zurich (cf. MAP Newsletter no. 1 @ www.map.ethz.ch) with the intention to define the scope of a 'Mesoscale Alpine Programme' (MAP) and the first guess for the timetable to follow. Five years ago (1999) the Special Observing Period of MAP whitnessed the culmination of the concerted efforts of several hundreds of scientists, students and technicians to document the state of the atmosphere above a major mountain range in unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. Since then numerous activities have been and are carried out to analyze the data collected and to use them for gaining improved operation tools and better physical understanding.

With this presentation the MAP Steering Committee chairperson intends to intensify the collection and discussion process about the overall achievements of MAP in an as impartial fashion as possible. Sample contributions from different institutions, countries and MAP sub-projects will be presented. A structuring by the wide topics 'observation systems', 'numerical modelling', 'physical understanding' serves to group the material. Wherever possible comparisons are made between the states-of-the-art in 1994 and 2004. It will also be attempted to distinguish between the 'general progress' in the field and the specific contribution of MAP. In this fashion, it is hoped, the envisaged evening discussions will get somewhat focussed and everybody interested will get the possibility to contribute to the MAP harvesting process, which is scheduled to end one year after the AMS-MM conference.

We note as an aside that the MAP process covers exactly the last decade of the century which elapsed since Vilhelm Bjerknes has first proposed his weather forecasting program in 1904 and of the quinquagesennium since the beginning of quasi-operational NWP in Sweden and the USA in 1954. Such a wider perspective may help to realistically assess size and added value of the achievements made during the conduct of MAP.