Important IPA contributions to the 30th International Conference on Alpine Meteorology
This year the International Conference on Alpine Meteorology (ICAM) took place in Germany for the 5th time. The DLR Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IPA) was responsible for the organisation of the event in close cooperation with the research department and the presidential bureau of Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). As regards science IPA-researchers were widely represented by chairing two of the sessions, four lectures and three posters, inter alia about the systematic determination of hot spots for thunderstorm generation by polarimetric radar measurements or about a combination of thunderstorm monitoring with numerical weather prediction on a probabilistic basis. Details, as the programme and the volume of over 120 extended abstracts, can be found on the website www.pa.op.dlr.de/icam2009.
Within the World Weather Research Programme of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) forecasting challenges at mountains and especially in mountainous coastal areas will constitute a focus of growing relevance. In close connection with the endeavours of the international programme THORPEX to accelerate progress in weather forecasting, this will not at the least be an important basis for better regional climate scenarios.