Nils Wedi

Digital Technology Lead for Destination Earth
Forecast, Earth System Modelling

Summary:

Dr Nils P. Wedi joined ECMWF in 1995. He received his PhD degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München. His career at ECMWF encapsulates a diverse range of work both technical and scientificHe is the Digital Technology Lead for Destination Earth at ECMWF, a recent initiative which is part of the European Commission’s Green Deal and the Digital Strategy. Destination Earth will create a high precision digital model of the Earth to model, monitor and simulate natural phenomena and related human activities. Prior to this appointment, Nils led ECMWF’s Earth System Modelling section that addresses all aspects of scientific and computational performance relating to ECMWF's forecast model and the ensemble forecasting system. He develops strategies to secure the scalability of the model on future high-performance computing systems and he has been involved in a number of H2020 projects to address the challenge of rising energy costs for computing towards affordable, exascale high performance data assimilation and simulations of weather and climate at km-scale resolutions. He actively collaborates with researchers worldwide, in particular through his role as a co-chair of the WMO working group on numerical experimentation (WGNE), a key link between weather and climate research.

Professional interests:

Nils's interest is in numerical weather prediction, high performance computing, and a widening perspective of relevant Earth system components such as oceans, waves, sea-ice and interconnecting impacts associated with the carbon and hydrological cycle, relevant for climate monitoring and projection. He has  a broad expertise in numerical methods, atmospheric dynamics and physics, across scales from global to laboratory. He also has a special interest in aviation and weather forecasting.

Career background:

2021-

Digital Technology Lead for Destination Earth, ECMWF

2016-2021

Head of the Earth System Modelling Section

2013-2016

Head of the Numerical Aspects Section

2004-2013

 Senior/Principal Scientist, ECMWF

2001-2004

PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
supervisor: Prof. Dr. U. Schumann, Prof. J. Egger

external advisor: P. K. Smolarkiewicz

1995-2001

Analyst, ECMWF

1990-1995

Diplom, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany
supervisor: Prof. Dr. W. Zdunkowski

External recognitions

2021-

co-Chair of the WMO WWRP/WCRP Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE)

2021-

Chair of the NEMO Scientific Advisory Committee

2018-

Member of the H2020 IMMERSE external expert Advisory Board

2015-2020

Member of the WMO JSC/CAS Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE)

2015-2020

Member in the working group ETP4HPC SRA Mathematics and Algorithms for extreme scale HPC systems

2015-2016

Member in the working group ETP4HPC SRA Energy and Resiliency

2010-2015

Executive Board Member of the Unified Model (UM) dynamical core project, which is part of the Next-Generation-Weather-and-Climate-Prediction (NGWCP) programme

2007-

Expert member of the Short Range Numerical Weather Prediction (SRNWP) network “Dynamics and lateral boundary coupling”

2003-2008

Member of the Partnership for Research Infrastructures in Earth System Modelling (PRISM)