The conference was well attended, especially by young people. I did
not see the whole group together, but I estimate that there were from 200-300
attendees. I could follow the Spanish spoken in several regional accents,
but the Portuguese left me. It is as different from Castillian as is French.
I think that I would have understood Italian better.
I met some friends from Madrid at the conference. Angel
Rivera Perez, Jefe del Area de Prediccion, from the Instituto Nacional
de Meteorologia (INM) and others from the INM. I met Francisco Valero
from the University of Madrid Complutense, and some of his students, including
Javier de La Cruz who visited Boulder several years ago. One night, we
skipped supper at the Hotel Playadulce and went into the historical, Moorish
stronghold town of Almeria to have "tapas and copas" instead of supper.
Tapas are what we used to know in the United States in the early 1900s
as "free lunch." You have a glass of wine (we had manzanilla, like a young
sherry), and a bit of food. We had a pleasant evening, and I would like
to thank Francisco Valero and students for taking me along.
My talk was well recieved, even though I tried to weave two themes (QG omega diagnostics and the Fort Collins Flash Flood of 28 July 1997) together in a short time format. I was allowed to run over because some attendees had lost funding to make the trip had to cancel at the last minute.
Carlos Pires, of the Geophysics Center at the Univeristy of Lisbon, and I talked a long time about various topics sparked by my talk. He said that Portugal would probably be interested in participating in the GAINS project. We also discussed numerical models, and I referred him to the ARPS Model at the University of Oklahoma which is available to meteorologists free.
At the end of the week, I flew to Madrid to meet with people at the INM and university of Madrid Complutense.