The preparation of the scientific strategy for phase 2 of ACCORD started with an initial phase of governance-level discussion (high-level priority topics, orientations by the Assembly), followed by an intensive bottom-up procedure from the thematic Task Teams. The material from the Task Teams was an input for the strategy workshop held in Toulouse in May 2024 with about 25 participants. The final document has been produced through the efforts of the drafting team and the STAC.
The end of this process was the approval by the 9th ACCORD Assembly meeting on 9 December 2024 of the "ACCORD Strategy 2026-2030" document.

In a broad overview, the main headlines in the strategy proposal could be summarized as follows:

• It is important to continue improving and monitoring the performance of the ACCORD systems with a trend toward very high resolution. Besides continuing to enhance the scientific possibilities and the technological abilities of the ACCORD codes, assessing model performance using appropriate validation tools and specialised observations will be required, and will help prove the added value of our models.
• New goals are formulated especially in the fields of “codes and system” (common development environment, R&D infrastructure) and meteorological quality assurance (with a focus on physics-based evaluation of model results, and the need for a related MQA-infrastructure which strongly links with the R&D infrastructure).
• The strategy on how to develop the common scripting system has been debated during the strategy preparation process quite in depth and at several levels. While the general goal to make a common scripting system is largely shared across the consortium, the concrete ways to produce it deserves further attention. The proposal is to make a development roadmap which will be drafted by a task force set up for this purpose - see more details in Item 10.b of the Agenda of this Assembly meeting.
• AI/ML for NWP has been taken into account in the strategy, on the one hand by expressing proposals regarding the joint use of ML and our traditional (physics-based) systems (hybrid ML-NWP), and on the other hand by making first proposals on how ACCORD can be proactive in this field and efficiently collaborate with the ML teams and the initiatives at European scale.

The scientific proposals are complemented with views on how to deal with the issue of limited resources (per thematic section), an issue also analyzed as a whole in the executive summary.
The reader is highly invited to focus on the executive summary for an initial and/or quick consultancy of the content, on the Introduction Section to learn more about the context and the general scope of ACCORD in phase 2, and finally to check the thematic sections.

To complement the strategy document, the 9th ACCORD Assembly, on 9 December 2024, approved forming a Task Force to work out a roadmap for the common scripting system (this topic has been recognized as very sensitive during the preparation of the scientific strategy).

The common scripting system roadmap was produced by the Task Force (core document) and complemented by the user stories (Annexe).