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Thomas Jung - Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany
Thomas works at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. He has received his PhD in atmospheric physics from University of Kiel and the Institute for Marine Research (now GEOMAR). He then went on to work for 10 years in the Research Department of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK. Thomas is head of the Climate Dynamics section at AWI and full professor for physics of the climate system at the University of Bremen. Thomas coordinates major research projects such as APPLICATE, which is funded through the EU Horizon2020 program. Thomas is an expert in the analysis, modelling and prediction of the climate system. Currently his work is focusing on the development of a new generation Earth system models that effectively and realistically simulate critical processes, such as ocean eddies, along with their impact on climate. By doing so, Thomas and his group exploit some of the largest high performance computing systems in the world. -
Dragana Bojovic - Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
Dragana has 15 years of experience in working on decision support for global environmental change. She has been collaborating with scientists, policy-makers and communities from different parts of the world, supporting knowledge transfer to enhance resilience to climate and other socio-ecological changes. Since 2016, Dragana has been working as a social scientist involved in climate services coproduction at BSC’s Earth Sciences Department. She holds a PhD in Science and Management of Climate Change (Ca’Foscari University of Venice) and a MSc in Environmental Change and Management (Oxford University). -
Marta Terrado - Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
Marta has an experience of more than 10 years in agriculture, water management and ecosystem services research. She is Science Communication Specialist at BSC’s Earth Science Department, supporting activities on communication, dissemination and user engagement. Working in the co-production of climate services, Marta facilitates knowledge transfer for climate change adaptation at the science-stakeholders interface. She has a PhD in Earth Sciences (University of Barcelona) and a Master’s degree in Geographical Information Systems (Polytechnic University of Catalonia). -
Gunilla Svensson - Stockholm University, Sweden
Gunilla’s research interests range from atmospheric boundary-layer turbulence and clouds to global scale circulation. Based at the University of Stockholm in Sweden, she develops and applies numerical models for small-scale atmospheric processes and studies the effect of these processes on atmospheric circulation patterns. She is particularly interested in the Arctic climate and climate change and is leading the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP) Task Team on processes. -
Taneil Uttal - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States
Taneil has been working for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research laboratories since 1978. Her work has centered on the development and analysis of state-of-the-art observations of the atmosphere. This has included studies of clouds with aircraft and ground-based radars, lidars and radiometers and integrated suites of instruments for measuring all components of the surface energy budget. She was the lead investigator on NOAA, NSF and NASA projects during the 1997-1998 Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) expedition centered on an ice-breaker frozen into the Arctic Ocean. This marked the beginning of her focus on Arctic studies. Since then she has developed an International Polar Year (IPY) consortium (International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere - www.IASOA.org) that has networked the observing capabilities and science expertise of the existing land-based atmospheric observatories that ring the Arctic Ocean. She in particular has been the U.S. partner (with Russia and Finland) in establishing the Tiksi, Russia observatory and (with Canada) in developing the Eureka and Alert, Canada observatories. She is currently preparing to deploy on the MOSAiC expedition ice-drift for the deep winter phase (Dec-Jan-Feb). Her current interests are networking atmosphere-ocean-ice-terrestrial measurements to obtain an integrated understanding of the total Arctic system. She is the leader of the NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory, Physical Science Division, Polar Observations and Processes Team. -
Heather Lawrence - European Center For Medium Range Weather Forecasts, United Kingdom
Heather received her bachelor's and master's degrees in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 2005 and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Bordeaux in 2010, where she worked on modelling the L-band microwave emission of land surfaces. During 2011 - 2012 Heather worked on soil moisture and vegetation optical depth retrievals from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite mission, at the Centre d'Etudes Spatiales de la BIOsphère (CESBIO), Toulouse, and the University of Valencia. In 2013 she joined the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) to work on the assimilation of microwave atmospheric sounding data for Numerical Weather Prediction. Her interests include the calibration/validation of new satellite instruments, data assimilation for numerical weather prediction and radiative transfer modelling, including of land and ocean surfaces. -
Doug Smith - MetOffice, United Kingdom
Doug leads the decadal climate prediction research and development at the Met Office Hadley Centre. Since joining the UK Met Office in 1997, Doug has developed the Met Office Decadal Climate Prediction System: DePreSys, leading the decadal prediction team since 2008. Before that, Doug worked on satellite remote sensing of sea ice and rainfall at University College London and the University of Bristol. Doug obtained a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Imperial College London. -
Barbara Casati - Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada
Barbara obtained her PhD on forecast verification methods in 2004 from the University of Reading (UK). She then consolidated her research interests at Environmental and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), first as a post-doc (2004-2007), and then in her current position of Research Scientist in verification and post-processing. She worked also on statistical analysis of extreme events with application to climate models (Ouranos, Montreal, 2007-2013). Barbara has been one of the founding members of the WMO Joint Working Group in forecast Verification Research (JWGFVR), and since 2016 she brings her strong expertise in forecast verification into the PPP Steering Group. -
Arlan Dirkson - Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Arlan began working on polar climate at the University of Montana while completing his Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics with a Minor in Geosciences. During that time, he worked closely with a team of glaciologists on topics related to ice sheets, which allowed him to also enjoy a summer field season in Greenland. Arlan then completed his PhD at the University of Victoria, where he carried out a body of research targeted toward improving seasonal Arctic sea ice predictions using the operational seasonal forecasting system for Environment and Climate Change Canada. Currently, he is working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and continues to work closely with government scientists at ECCC. His overall research focus is on developing user-relevant sea ice forecast information using multi-model ensembles, in order to support climate services provided by the WMO Arctic Regional Climate Centre in Montreal, Canada. -
Thomas Spengler - University of Bergen, Norway
Thomas is a meteorologist focusing on the combination of theory, observations, and modelling. He has specialized on a variety of scales ranging from meso, synoptic, to large-scale flow and participated in several field campaigns addressing meso-scale atmospheric flow and atmosphere-ocean interactions. Since 2015, Thomas is the director of the NFR funded Norwegian Research School on Changing Climates in the Coupled Earth System (CHESS). His specific research interests are devoted to interaction between different space and time scales as well as the influence of diabatic processes in the atmosphere. IHe is currently leading research projects focusing on high impact weather in the Arctic, e.g., Polar lows and topographically initiated wind events with an increasing interest on atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions. In 2012 he was elected as a member of the International Commission for Dynamic Meteorology and became its elected president in 2019. He led several international workshops, often focusing on Arctic processes and atmosphere-ocean-ice interaction. He was awarded the prize for best lecturer of the academic year 2012/2013 at the Faculty for Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Bergen and nominated for the IAMAS early career scientist medal in 2013. In 2013, Thomas was nominated as Norwegian delegate to the Atmospheric Working Group of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), of which he was elected chair from 2015 until 2019. -
Irina Sandu - European Center For Medium Range Weather Forecasts, United Kingdom
Irina earned her PhD from Meteo-France and Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse in 2007. Her PhD research based on Large-Eddy Simulations helped demonstrating that aerosol-cloud interactions are far more complex than initially thought and that the current parametrizations used in climate models are inadequate. Irina then spent a couple of years as an Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (2008-2010). Irina joined ECMWF in 2010, and is now leading the Physical Processes Team. Her research has so far covered boundary layer clouds and the factors controlling their distribution, aerosol-cloud interactions, turbulent diffusion in stable conditions, orographic drag and land-atmosphere coupling. At ECMWF, Irina's work aims at improving the representation physical processes (both stable and cloudy boundary layers) in the Integrated Forecasting System (in climate models), and at understanding the impact of surface drag on the large scale atmospheric circulation, which were subject to some of the most longstanding errors of the ECWMF forecasts. In recent years, Irina played an instrumental role in reviving the interest of the international community for the drag processes, and the orographic drag in particular, by highlighting their importance for the large-scale circulation and the uncertainties related to their representation in models. Irina is also now coordinating polar prediction related activities at ECMWF, particularly in the context of the ongoing WMO Year of Polar Prediction and the H2020 project APPLICATE. -
Jonathan (Jonny) Day - European Center For Medium Range Weather Forecasts, United Kingdom
Jonny is a member of the diagnostics team at the European Center For Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). His work focusses on coupled processes and predictability in cold climate zones. He has been a steering group member of the WMO – Polar Prediction Project since 2013. Before joining ECMWF in 2017 Jonny was an AXA Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading. His research focussed on Arctic cyclones, sea ice prediction and polar climate processes. Before this he was a Post-Doc at the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). He received his PhD from the University of Bristol in 2011.