Meeting of the MOPEX Coordination Group, Birmingham, UK, 4.00pm, 28 July 1999

Before an audience of approximately 45, John Schaake began the meeting by outlining the philosophy of MOPEX and the opportunities which a cooperative approach could bring to the project.

As acting chairman Alan Hall briefly reviewed the first preliminary meeting of MOPEX held in November 1996 at the Wallingford Workshop on "Continental Scale Hydrological models: Charting the Future".

The current status of MOPEX was briefly reviewed, referring back to the previous days presentation by John Schaake on "Opportunities for Improved Estimation of Parameters of Hydrological Models" in the IAHS HW4 Workshop on "Regionalization of Parameters of Hydrological and Atmospheric Land Surface Models". Under MOPEX Phase I (1997-1999) data collection and analysis has concentrated on the US and comprehensive data are available on the MOPEX ftp site for the SW part (Arkansas-Red River basin) of the Mississippii River basin. Additional data have been prepared for the Ohio River basin and processing is nearly complete for some 2000 basins covering the entire US. Data have been received for basins in Australia and New Zealand, but remain to be updated and assessed. Discussions have been held with a number of European countries and potential basins identified.

A funding submission for MOPEX Phase II (2000-2002) is due and the meeting was asked for ideas as to future activities.

Expansion of the data base was supported citing several existing/upcoming projects, eg the EU Project on Remote Sensing, which had the potential to contribute. In addition to earlier discussions on European data several further offers of data were made or identified during the two days of HW4. It was emphasised that sufficient metadata were necessary for researchers to assess the quality of the data. The value of well documented, quality controlled and comprehensive basin data to assist global hydrological research was recognised as was the effort that goes in to producing these data. The wider availability of rsearch data will allow new researchers to concentrate more on the science rather than spend time on dta preparation.

The value of a basin data set available to a number of researchers was confirmed by the five presenters at HW4 who used the Arkansas-Red River basin dta from the MOPEX ftp site. Based on this experience and the value of the GEWEX PILPS experiments/workshops to the meteorological community, the meeting determined a parallel effort should be undertaken by the hydrological community. Building on the experience of the WMO Intercomparison of Snowmelt Models it was agreed that a Workshop should be held within the next two years on the Intercomparison of Hydrological Parameter Estimation Techniques. There was a brief discussion on measures of model performance and measures of parameter uncertainty.

To organise and run the Workshop the following offered their services and expressed their interest to participate:

Keith Bevin, Lancaster University

Howard Wheater, Imperial College, London

Hoshin Gupta, University of Arizona

George Leavesley, USGS, Denver, Colorado

Wolfgang Fluegel, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena

Jim Wallace, Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford

Richard Vogel, Tufts University, Medford, MA

Daoyi Chen, University of Manchester

John Schaake and Qingyun Duan, U.S. National Weather Service, Silver Spring

The draft Terms of Reference were briefly discussed with further comments sort on the revised text to be placed on the MOPEX Website. It was agreed that there was not a need to have a formal closely run Steering Group in a similar manner to other GEWEX activities and that a Coordination Group open to all interested parties would be an appropriate model for this cooperative project.

It was agreed that Alan Hall would chair the Coordination Group and that a new chairman would take over at the next meeting scheduled for the IAHS Assembly in July 2001 in Maastricht.

The meeting concluded at 5.05 pm with the agreement that a report of the meeting would be posted on the MOPEX Website.