Project Organisation

During the last decade, the DRAKKAR participating scientists fostered co-operative scientific activities within the Mast3 European project DYNAMO (Dynamics of North Atlantic Models), and between their national projects, CLIPPER in France and FLAME (Family of Linked Atlantic models) in Germany. The expertise gained through projects such as these also helped to build their capability to make significant contributions a the variety of modelling needs. However, the challenge of developing realistic ocean models required for the diverse range of applications can only be met by an effective integration and co-ordination of the activities and complementary expertise of every member of the group. This fact yielded the DRAKKAR concept. The project is organised with an international project-team comprising research groups in France, Germany, and Russia, and associated scientists who cooperate with the project.

  Drakkar project-team

Scientists participating to the Drakkar project-team are from 8 different laboratories; LEGI in Grenoble, LPO in Brest, LOCEAN in Paris, MERCATOR-Ocean in Toulouse, LSCE in Orsay, IFM-Geomar in Kiel, and Shirshov Institute of Oceanography (SIO) in Moscow. The project­team conducts the project activities. It has the charge to define details of the model configurations, to implement and to validate their various components. This team also defines model experiments to run, co-ordinates their execution by the participating groups, and organises the sharing of model results.  

Associate Scientists

The DRAKKAR project team promotes collaboration with Associate Scientists conducting researches complementary to the DRAKKAR objectives to enhance the scientific value of model developments, simulation outputs and to foster multidisciplinary studies. Associate scientists may also get DRAKKAR model configurations to carry out their own simulations. In that case, it is important that when possible, they co-ordinate their simulations with those carried-out with the project-team. An objective of DRAKKAR is to gather a community of competences and means to improve global eddy-permitting to eddy resolving models. Collaborating partners are thus expected to contribute to model refinement, in particular by additional, complementary sensitivity experiments. This includes the participation in experiments dedicated to the coordinated development. Associate scientists using DRAKKAR model configurations must commit themselves to not give model configurations to other groups. The DRAKKAR project team wants to control the distribution configurations to avoid their distribution on the grapevine.

  Cooperation with scientists outside the project

The DRAKKAR team is generally favourable to share model outputs and configurations with scientists outside the project. In case the scientific objectives of outside scientists overlap those of the project-team, a cooperation should be sought that favours complementarity of studies. Note that the group has no means dedicated to service outside the group, and technical support to transfer DRAKKAR configurations will be limited. Scientists using Drakkar model configurations must commit themselves to not give them to a third party. Major funding of DRAKKAR project comes from the MERCATOR consortium, and model configurations have been (and will continue to be) developed jointly with MERCATOR. Consequently, the team will not give model configurations to groups involved in activities directly related to operational or commercial oceanography. These groups will have to address such request directly to the MERCATOR consortium. Finally, it should be noted that DRAKKAR model configurations are not included in the NEMO distribution, but are using it. NEMO is freely available and is distributed by LOCEAN. Users of DRAKKAR configurations, as all NEMO users, must register at LOCEAN.

The French DRAKKAR team:

The German FLAME Team:

The concept of DRAKKAR is to integrate the skills and means of several research teams whose scientific objectives significantly overlap, in order to enhance their capabilities to develop state of the art numerical ocean circulation models. Such a collaborative effort, which requires an important commitment from each team, is expected to last longer than the typical duration of a scientific project such as DRAKKAR (2004-2009) or the German SFB460 (2002-2006), and is intended to serve the needs of new scientific projects in the future.