International NAWDIC Workshop in Karlsruhe
Winter storms regularly form over the North Atlantic, causing billions of Euros of damage in Europe every year due to extreme wind speeds and heavy precipitation. However, the small-scale physical processes that lead to the highest wind speeds are currently neither fully understood nor correctly represented in weather forecast models. One of the reasons for this is that the processes that determine our weather take place in remote regions over the North Atlantic, where there are few operational observations. To shed more light on these processes, the large-scale measurement campaign “North Atlantic Waveguide, Dry Intrusion and Downstream Impact Campaign” (NAWDIC; https://www.nawdic.kit.edu/) will take place over the North Atlantic. NAWDIC, which is led by IMKTRO and funded by the DFG, brings together research institutions and weather services from Europe and North America and, with its numerous airborne and ground-based meteorological measurements, will be part of coordinated, hemisphere-spanning observations of atmospheric dynamics.
In mid-September 2025, more than 80 campaign participants from nine countries, 53 of whom attended in person at KIT (Fig. 1), met for three days to present and discuss NAWDIC's research projects as part of an international workshop. In addition to numerous scientific presentations and a poster session, the program included discussion rounds on topics such as planning coordination, forecasting tools, data management, and outreach activities. The day after the NAWDIC workshop, the kick-off meeting of the German-French subproject DICHOTOMI (https://www.nawdic.kit.edu/156.php; https://nawdic.aeris-data.fr/) and a training session for the interactive 3D visualization software “Met.3D” (https://met3d.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) took place, which will be used alongside other forecasting tools during the campaign. Less than four months before the start of the measurement campaign, the NAWDIC workshop provided an extremely important platform for scientific exchange, international coordination of measurement activities, and, last but not least, for the campaign participants to get to know each other personally, thus fulfilling essential prerequisites for the successful implementation of such a complex research project.
The core component of NAWDIC is the German research aircraft HALO (https://www.dlr.de/de/forschung-und-transfer/projekte-und-missionen/halo), which will conduct measurement flights over the eastern North Atlantic from Shannon (Ireland) over a period of six weeks in January and February 2026. In addition, a French research aircraft and an aircraft from the Technical University of Braunschweig, as well as the mobile observation platform KITcube (https://www.kitcube.kit.edu/), will collect high-resolution information on wind, humidity, temperature, cloud cover, and atmospheric trace gases. Further coordinated aircraft measurements upstream over the western North Atlantic and eastern Pacific by American partner projects will help to understand further aspects of the life cycle of dynamic weather systems and to better represent them in weather forecasts in the long term.
B. Kirsch, A. Oertel, and J. Quinting
