The FASTEX   campaign, that took place in January-February 1997 over the whole Northern Atlantic region, was the first exercise for the real-time adaptive observation.

In this campaign, adaptive observation was the approach chosen to observe the early stages of development of lows in the Atlantic stormtrack. This allowed to locate the observing platforms where the storm is expected to birn. By introducing more observations at the beginning of the cyclogenesis, there was not only a better observation of this phase of cyclogenesis, but this also improved the forecast. Better forecast were of great help in planning observation deployments throughout the life-cycle of atmospheric lows that were chased during the FASTEX   campaign.

During FASTEX  , the objective techniques used for targetting were the singular vectors, the forecast sensitivity to initial conditions and the Ensemble Transform (E-T  ). Some subjective techniques (i.e. based only on forecaster expertise) were also tested at that time.

A complete overview of this campaign is available on the website of FASTEX   experiment.