12-13th December 2012
European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) (Reading, England)
The World Weather Research Program (WWRP) Polar Prediction Project (PPP) is a ten year initiative aiming to promote cooperative international research into polar weather prediction at hourly to seasonal timescales. As part of this project plans are being made for a Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP) in 2017-2018, this will involve an intensive observation and modelling effort to improve polar prediction.
Ella Darlington and Jonny Day attended this meeting representing APECS, who are being consulted on project matters related to outreach and education. The meeting was mainly concerned with finalising the project implementation plan. During the discussion on how early career scientists could become more involved in and contribute to the PPP, the following ideas were discussed:
- Invite early career scientists to PPP events (not just workshops; but also steering groups, etc.).
- Run mentoring sessions at SG meetings and PPP workshops.
- Involve early career scientists in informal social settings such as icebreakers where they are encouraged to meet and talk with senior scientists.
- Run skills training workshops to ensure that early career scientists are familiar with tools as well as operational in-house systems (e.g., models, and diagnosis and verification systems) and can more readily run models or analyse operational centre data. (Existing examples include twice yearly WRF workshops and verification workshops run by JWGFVR.).
- Run summer schools.
It was agreed to:
- Invite local APECS representative(s) to take part in the next PPP-SG meeting (tentatively Boulder, Colorado, USA in October 2013).
- Run a mentoring session in association with the PPP-SG meeting.
In addition Jonny agreed to sit on the project steering group and YOPP planning committee to liaise with both the PPP steering group and APECS concerning the PPP education and outreach plan and its implementation.
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/wwrp/new/polar_prediction_research_project_main_page.html