The Met Office played a leading role in organising a successful international field campaign spanning the period 13 October to 12 December 2003, called the North Atlantic THORPEX Regional Campaign (A-TReC). The main component of this campaign was the Atlantic THORPEX Observing System Test (Atlantic-TOST), which could change the way the weather is observed and forecast. By targeting the observations in areas where they are specifically needed the Atlantic-TOST hopes to improve the accuracy of forecasts - especially of weather systems that are particularly difficult to track.

The European participation was organised by EUCOS (EUMETNET Composite Observing System) which is under the responsibility of the Met Office. ECMWF played a particularly important role including the provision of a web page displaying their sensitive area predictions and those provided by the Met Office and Meteo-France and the creation of the A-TReC data sets containing the additional observations produced during the field campaign. Other organisations made significant contributions, including 18 European national met. services as members of EUMETNET, EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites); the American organisations NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), NCAR (National Centre for Atmospheric Research) and NRL (Naval Research Laboratory); Environment Canada (Meteorological Service of Canada); NRC (Canadian National Research Council); DLR (The German Aerospace Centre) and LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science).

The A-TReC campaign was the first major Met Office participation in the international THORPEX research programme. More about our THORPEX research work.