Chaired by its President Dr Adérito Vicente Serrão from Portugal, the ECMWF Council held its 70th session in Reading on 2-3 December 2008.
The Council made some milestone decisions:
• Unanimous decision on a long-term solution to the funding of the Budgetised Pension Scheme.
• Approval of the budget 2009 including increased expenditures for the Centre's new High Performance Computer Facility.
• Unanimous approval that, during GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) pre-operations, access by the GMES Core Services to ECMWF data and products required as input for their respective GMES Services will be free of information charge on the understanding that each consortium member within those Services signs a licence with ECMWF.
• Unanimous authorisation to the Director to start negotiations on full membership with those States that have concluded a co-operation agreement for eventual accession to the ECMWF Convention and with EU Member States that wish to accede to the ECMWF Convention. The Council also adopted template texts for a Council resolution on the accession of a State to the ECMWF Convention, and for an agreement on accession to the ECMWF Convention and related terms and conditions.
• Unanimous agreement that the resolution of the products made available to WMO members be increased from the current 2.5 to a 0.5 degree latitude/longitude grid.
• Unanimous adoption of the updated “Four-Year Programme of Activities” for the period 2009–2012.
