The HERA project is part of the Mesoscale Alpine Programme (MAP). This international research initiative aims towards improved understanding and numerical prediction of atmospheric flow, precipitation, and hydrological processes in the Alpine region, with particular consideration to heavy precipitation and flash flooding events. The project will culminate in a large-scale international field campaign in the Alpine region in 1999. The specific HERA objectives are:
-to establish a multi-year systematic collection of heavy precipitation episodes by processing combined data sets from ground based radar, surface and upper air observations;
-to analyse major precipitation events by applying operational and research-type numerical weather prediction models, and to quantify the underlying physical processes;
-to adapt airborne radar algorithms to measurements over mountainous terrain; and
-to develop and to implement new high-resolution numerical techniques (non-hydrostatic grid nesting).
Specific aspects considered by research teams at ETH relate to the atmospheric dynamics of heavy Alpine precipitation events, and to their frequency, structure spatial extent and temporal duration. These research task are primarily based on high-resolution atmospheric numerical modeling and on weather radar data. Furthermore, ETH hosts the MAP Data Center which is used by the HERA project.
The final report of HERA, consisting of 14 peer-reviewed papers (among them 4 with Swiss contributions) will be published as a special issue of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics in fall 1999. Pre-reviewed versions of the publications are available over
ftp://ftp.pa.op.dlr.de/pub/hera/EUreport/index.html.
