One of the goals of the ground-based support program for the COROT and MONS/Rømer satellite missions is to select and characterise suitable target stars for the part of the missions dedicated to asteroseismology .
While the global atmospheric parameters may be determined with good accuracy from the Strömgren indices , careful abundance analysis must be made for the proposed main targets .
This is a time consuming process considering the long list of primary and secondary targets .
We have therefore developed new software called vwa for this task .
The vwa automatically selects the least blended lines from the atomic line database vald , and consequently adjusts the abundance in order to find the best match between the calculated and observed spectra .
The variability of HD 49434 was discovered as part of COROT ground-based support observations .
Here we present a detailed abundance analysis of HD 49434 using vwa .
For most elements we find abundances somewhat below the Solar values , in particular we find [ Fe/H ] = -0.13 \pm 0.14 .
We also present the results from the study of the variability that is seen in spectroscopic and photometric time series observations .
From the characteristics of the variation seen in photometry and in the line profiles we propose that HD 49434 is a variable star of the \gamma Doradus type .