date: Wed May 16 09:49:47 2001
from: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: COAPEC
to: Myles Allen <M.R.Allen@rl.ac.uk>

At 09:04 16/05/01 +0100, you wrote:
>Janice seems to being deliberately obtuse.  She was telling me you would
>be out of a job if we didn't have the money to UEA from 1st June: Brian is
>setting up a subcontract, which should be through shortly.  I'm pretty
>much out of the loop as far as admin goes on this grant, so you're best
>off communicating with Brian.  Scott starts on 1st July, so we'll be
>wanting to get going on the work immediately after that: I'm pleased to
>hear you won't want to actually start doing anything before then, because
>it will definitely make sense for us to work out who does what together.

Thanks for your reassuring reply, Myles!  Who is Scott by the way?  Sounds like we should meet over the summer to plan out the work, though that can be difficult due to holidays etc.  I'm planning to visit the Hadley Centre sometime over the next 5 weeks and will talk with Mark Rodwell if he's available about accessing the HadAM3 SST-forced ensemble.  My aim is to spread the 6 months of COAPEC money over the next 12 months or so, interspersed with 8 months that I've got from Tyndall Centre funding.

>Apologies for not keeping you all more up-to-date, but you know what it's
>like.  How did your paleo-bid to FW5 go?  We didn't get the
>climateprediction.com bid, despite doing very well on the science.  It was
>deemed (a) too ambitious and (b) insufficiently European -- hard to see a
>way out of that one.

No luck either - it was ruled "out of scope" and not even evaluated.  This is worse than simply failing - in our case no one even read the proposal that took me two weeks to put together!  I don't even understand how it could be out of scope when the work programme stated "verification of model capability for simulation of climate changes over past decades and centuries" and the aim of our project was to evaluate HadCM3 and ECHAM over the past 5 centuries!  We have written a stinking letter, but it won't help.

With this disappointment plus some others I'm now re-assessing my medium-term plans - if you spot any opportunities that don't involve fixed-term contracts in expensive parts of the country then please let me know! :-)

Cheers

Tim