IMAP workshop Beit Jala

Joint workshop held in Beit Jala to discuss progress and interactions

• Christian Chwala

Meeting

IMAP is a trilateral project with German, Israeli and Palestinian partners. Due to the political situation it was, however, not straightforward to find a venue to which all participants could travel. For our workshop in 2015 we identified the Everest Hotel in Beit Jala as a possible location, because it is in a part of the Area C of the West Bank which is accessible to both, Israelis and Palestinians.

map_beit_jala Map of the region around Jerusalem, with Beit Jala in the South close to Bethlehem. The map shows the different areas and the security infrastructures in between them. More info can be found in the full map at wikipedia.

This allowed us to have a joint project meeting with the full IMAP team in the region. For all IMAP researchers it was for sure a special experience to work and meet in this small zone between borders which are not easily traversable for parts of the team.

group picture Group picture in front of the Everest Hotel in Beit Jala

Nevertheless, we had to focus on the science, in particular the upcoming milestones of IMAP phase 1 and the renewal proposal wich was scheduled for early 2016. Besides presenting and discussing the state of the individual work packages a large portion of time was spent on setting up CML data exchange and on developing a concept for integrating CML data in the hydrological model WRF-Hydro Offline.

schedule

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