The Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC)

The SAC provides the Council with opinions and recommendations on the draft programme of activities of the Centre drawn up by the Director-General and on any other matters submitted by the Council. The members of the SAC are appointed in their personal capacity and are selected from among the scientists of the Member States.

PDF iconSAC Rules of procedure

Next session

7-9 October 2024

SAC members and Experts

Image of Thomas Jung

Professor Dr Thomas Jung

Chair

Alfred Wegener Institute and Professor for Physics of the Climate System (Theory and Modelling), University of Bremen

Profile

Prof Thomas Jung in an expert in climate analysis, modelling and prediction from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. He has received his PhD 2000 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. Prof Jung is head of the Climate Dynamics section at AWI and full professor for physics of the climate system at the University of Bremen. He is also spokesperson of AWI’s research programme. Furthermore, he acts as the chair of various committees, including the Polar Prediction Project of the World Meteorological Organisation. Prof Jung coordinates major research projects such as APPLICATE, which is funded through the Horizon2020 program, and Advanced Earth System Modelling Capacity, which is funded through the Helmholtz Association.

Susanna Corti

Dr Susanna Corti

Vice-Chair

Senior Scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), Italy

Profile

Dr Corti is the Coordinator of the Climate Dynamics and Variability Research Unit (DIVAC) at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

Before joining ISAC-CNR, she worked at CINECA (Italian Inter-University Consortium for High Performance Computing), where she has contributed to a number of EU-funded projects on weather and climate research.

During her career she worked at ECMWF in the Research Department  on two EU-funded projects: “Short-term climate variability" and "THOR (Thermohaline Overturning at Risk?)".

Her research interests include sub-seasonal to decadal ensemble climate predictions; high-resolution climate reconstructions and future scenarios; weather and climate predictability; impact of stochastic physical parametrizations in model simulations from sub-seasonal to centennial time-scales; and reconstruction of climate variability over Europe.

Dr Corti is Executive Editor of "Climate Dynamics”.

Susanna Corti at ISAC

Eskes

Dr Henk Eskes

Senior scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Netherlands

Profile

The research of Dr Eskes focuses on the composition of the atmosphere. He is an expert on atmospheric chemistry modelling, chemical data assimilation and satellite observations of trace gases in the atmosphere. Henk Eskes is strongly involved in the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), implemented by ECMWF, and was involved in the European research projects MACC and GEMS preparing for the CAMS operational service. He is currently the coordinator of the CAMS validation contract, leading a consortium of 14 partners. He is also product lead for the NO2 product of TROPOMI on the Sentinel-5P satellite and involved in the preparation for Sentinels 4 and 5.

Dr Christina Koepken-Watts

Data assimilation section, German Weather Service, Germany

Profile

Dr Köpken-Watts is the scientific team leader for satellite data assimilation within the data assimilation section of the German Weather Service (DWD). Her main  development focus is the use of satellite radiances. She is also the project team leader for DWD within the NWP SAF cooperation with the Met Office, Météo-France and ECMWF.

She graduated in Meteorology and received her PhD from the University of Bonn (Germany), her Diplom and PhD research including an extended research visit at LMD (Paris) and co-operation with University of Bergen and the NMI (MET Norway) in the areas of satellite retrievals and satellite retrieval assimilation for polar low simulations, respectively.

Joining DWD she worked within the European funded BALTEX project on regional re-analysis for the Baltic area as well as the use of rain radar observations and ground-based GPS data, a new data source in meteorology at the time.

She went on to work for three years in the research department of ECMWF as a EUMETSAT fellow for the assimilation of geostationary radiances. After returning to DWD, her main research focus is the use of microwave and infrared satellite radiances for operational NWP, but she also contributed to work on scatterometer winds and atmospheric motion vectors.

Dr Köpken-Watts is a member of the EUMETSAT science working group (STG-SWG) and of the IRS mission advisory group (IRSMAG).

Prof Dr Nedjeljka Žagar

 

Atmospheric Dynamics and Predictability Group, University of Hamburg

Profile

Nedjeljka Žagar is a professor of theoretical meteorology at the University of Hamburg where she leads the Atmospheric Dynamics and Predictability Group https://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/en/arbeitsgruppen/theoretische-meteorologie.html. Her research addresses topics in large-scale dynamics, data assimilation and predictability focusing on the tropics. Her group develops reduced-complexity models for studying dynamics and data assimilation and maintains the MODES webpage https://modes.cen.uni-hamburg.de for real-time scale- and dynamical-regime decomposition of the ECMWF model outputs. 

Nedjeljka received her PhD in dynamical meteorology in 2004, from the Meteorological Institute of Stockholm University, Sweden, on tropical data assimilation modelling and the potential impact of the Aeolus wind satellite. She then went on to become assistant professor at the Department of Physics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she advanced to an associate and full professor of meteorology. Her postdoctoral fellowship was awarded by the Advanced Study Program of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA.  Early in her career, she was an active member of the international ALADIN model development team at the Croatian weather service and worked on mesoscale NWP applications. 

Nedjeljka's research has been funded by the European Research Council and European Space Agency, among others.  She has two decades of active collaboration with the ECMWF scientists on topics in dynamics, data assimilation and predictability. 

Oliver Fuhrer

 

Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss

Profile

Oliver Fuhrer is head of the division Numerical Prediction (30 staff) at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss. In this role is is responsible for the development and operation of the suite of numerical weather prediction models for Switzerland. Oliver Fuhrer is Senior Director of Climate Modeling at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit philanthropy of Microsoft co-founder Paul G Allen. There he is currently incubating a high-risk, high-reward research effort (16 staff)
jointly with Prof Chris Bretherton focusing on the application of novel software engineering techniques and machine-learning to reduce the uncertainty of current climate model projections.

Oliver Fuhrer’s research background is in convection-resolving modeling of weather and climate as well as computational science and high-performance computing. He has further been actively involved in research related to air quality modeling, modeling of the atmospheric boundary layer, numerical methods for fluid dynamics, and data assimilation.

Prof Simon Vosper

Executive Director of Science, UK Met Office

Profile

As the Director of Science at the Met Office I am a member of the Executive leadership team, and along with my fellow Executive directors, am responsible for the development and implementation of Met Office Corporate and Research and Innovation strategies. I am also responsible for the delivery of the scientific capabilities enabled by our current and future supercomputing capability.
I have specific responsibilities for leading the Science Directorate, a team of approximately 550 scientists and scientific software engineers, whose pioneering research underpins the Met Office seamless weather and climate science. I am also the Senior Responsible Owner for the Met Office Next Generation Modelling Systems programme. This is reformulating and redesigning the Met Office’s complete weather and climate research and operational/production systems, enabling us to exploit future generations of supercomputers and remain at the forefront of weather and climate science and services.

Professor Pier Siebesma

Professor at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Chair of mesoscale modelling cluster, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)

Profile

Pier Siebesma at TU Delft

Professor Gunilla Svensson

Department of Meteorology (MISU), Stockholm University, Sweden

Profile

https://www.su.se/english/profiles/gsven-1.182452

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Dr Isabel Trigo

IPMA, Portugal

Profile

Isabel Trigo graduated in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and received her the PhD degree from the University of East Anglia (UK). Dr Trigo initiated her research career in the area of climate variability, studying synoptic systems in mid-latitudes. She briefly worked as a visiting scientist at ECMWF, where she started exploring satellite data to assess the land surface scheme.

Currently, Dr Trigo is a senior researcher at Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera, IPMA (Portugal), where she leads the Remote Sensing Group. Her research focuses on applications of remote sensing observations to derive land surface variables, and on their use to better understand and model land surface processes. She is the Scientific Coordinator for the EUMETSAT Satellite Applications Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) and has acted as local PI for several international products funded by ESA, and by Copernicus and European Programmes.

Anthony Weaver

Dr Anthony Weaver

Senior Researcher at the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation (CERFACS), France

 Profile

Dr Weaver’s main area of interest has been ocean data assimilation. He has also worked on general algorithmic aspects of variational assimilation and covariance modelling.

He has worked with ECMWF for many years, in recent years giving help and guidance on the NEMOVAR ocean data assimilation system, a collaborative project between ECMWF, the Met Office, CERFACS and INRIA (French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics).

NEMOVAR is the backbone of ECMWF’s ocean reanalysis ORAS4 and the new ocean reanalysis ORAS5, and is used to initialise the S4 seasonal forecasts and the coupled ensemble forecasts.

Dr Weaver is a member of several international committees and panels as well as a Principal Investigator on a number of European projects.

François Bouyssel

NWP group, Météo-France

Profile

François currently leads the numerical weather prediction (NWP) research group at Météo-France in charge of maintaining and developing the global (Arpege) and regional (Arome) operational numerical weather forecasting systems of Météo-France and of conducting research which prepares future versions. This mission is carried out in an environment of strong international cooperation. These NWP systems are based on a computer code common to many services in Europe, such as ECMWF and ACCORD consortium.

Previously, François was leading the team in charge of the representation of atmospheric and surface physical processes in operational NWP systems developed at Météo-France. The team has contributed to the development of a new prognostic moist physics common for NWP and Climat versions of the global model and of the prototype and the first operational versions of a kilometric-scale NWP regional model (Arome).

At the beginning of his career, he performed research activities on the assimilation of surface parameters for continental surfaces in NWP systems, in the continuation of his PhD on developing a variational analysis of superficial soil moisture and temperature from screen level atmospheric parameters. He was also involved in the development of linearized physical parametrizations for the 4DVar analysis of the global NWP system and of an optimal interpolation analysis for surface and upper-air parameters for nowcasting at regional scales.

His research activities are on modelling of atmospheric physical processes (microphysics, convection, orographic gravity wave drag) at different spatial and temporal scales.