Welcome speech - Peter Aakjaer, Director General, DMI

Dear Colleagues!

I am pleased to welcome you all here at DMI to this COST/NETFAM
workshop on the integration of weather models and air pollution
models, and I am happy to get the opportunity to address you here
today.

Weather hazards, the environment and climate change are of concern to
all of us. Especially, how human activities impact nature is essential
to understand. And its monitoring, forecasting and research are thus
of the utmost importance.

Furthermore, climate change and pollution of the environment do not
respect national borders, so international collaboration on these
issues is indeed extremely important.

Here at DMI we have a long experience in environmental modelling and
forecasting. Our activities include weather and climate modelling and
modelling atmospheric dispersion, transformation and deposition of
pollutants.

Our weather forecasting model - DMI-HIRLAM - has been developed
over many years - and is now run operationally for Denmark and
Greenland in a 5 km horizontal resolution. The general quality of
HIRLAM has been improved enormously over the years, and the
improvements are expected to continue over the next years due to the
fact that we will acquire a new High Speed Computer. We are at the
moment in the ITT process hoping for at least a factor of 10-12 to the
speed of our present system.

DMI has a long tradition of working on many aspects concerning air
pollution, both nationally and internationally - not only research,
but we are - like many meteorological institutes also the
national focal point for several emergency preparedness dealing with
nuclear, bio- and veterinary emergency, pollen forecasting, risk
assessments, and airborne dispersion of foot-and-mouth disease virus
to mention a few.

And I cannot resist mentioning that we are proud that our model DERMA
was one of the most successful among 28 models in the European Tracer
EXperiment - ETEX - some years ago.

An automatic computerised system has been developed providing
real-time high-resolution forecast data derived from the DMI-HIRLAM
system to ARGOS and RODOS for urban- and regional-scale atmospheric
dispersion modelling. DMI led a big European project FUMAPEX, which
developed a new generation Integrated Urban Air Quality Information
and Forecasting System and implemented it in 6 European cities.

In the future, the increasing resolution of meteorological, climate
and oceanographic models are paving the way for integrated modelling
of the Earth system and the possibility to include meteorology,
environment, climate, ocean, cryosphere and ecosystem
interactions. DMI strongly supports this development and is currently
focussing on such a project. As part of this strategy we are currently
developing a chemical weather forecast model, ENVIRO-HIRLAM, which
will include interactions between meteorology and air pollution.

I hope - and I am sure - that the discussion during this workshop will
lead to synergy between the meteorological and air pollution
communities and that this can be used to develop more precise models
for the benefit of all of us.

I wish you all a fruitful meeting and a pleasant stay in
Copenhagen. The weather during your stay seems to bee on your side.

Thank you for your attention.