ECMWF’s governing body, the Council, has elected Professor Jorge Miguel Alberto de Miranda (Portugal) as its President and Professor Juhani Damski (Finland) as its Vice‐President, both for a first term of office of one year from December 2016.
It has also appointed five new members to the Centre’s Scientific Advisory Committee. Dr Susanna Corti, Dr Inger‐Lise Frogner, Professor Pier Siebesma, Professor Gunilla Svensson, and Dr Anthony Weaver began their four-year terms in December 2016.
Each ECMWF Member State is represented at Council, setting the policies that govern all areas of the Centre’s research, operational and administrative work.
At least one delegate from each Member State comes from the national meteorological service, ensuring that ECMWF’s strategy and plans are driven by requirements identified by Member States to improve forecasting systems and the quality of the forecasts.
Professor Miranda is President of Portugal’s national meteorological service, the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere. He is well known at ECMWF, having served as the Council Vice-President from December 2013 to December 2016.
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Professor Miguel Miranda, President of the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere, was appointed President of ECMWF’s Council in December 2016. |
ECMWF Director-General Florence Rabier welcomed Professor Miranda’s appointment and said:
“The role of our Council is paramount to the functioning and success of ECMWF. The expertise of the Directors of our Member States’ national meteorological services, as well as their frontline positions in their respective countries, ensures that our efforts go where they are most useful. The President always has the difficult task of ensuring that all Member States’ voices are heard, and that decisions and choices reflect the diversity of the Member States’ requirements.
“Our previous President, Professor Gerhard Adrian, leaves big shoes to fill, but I know that Professor Miranda will bring in his scientific expertise as well as his sensitive and sensible leadership. Whilst the previous term was marked by the development of ECMWF’s next ten-year Strategy, the forthcoming one is likely to be very much about the relocation of our data centre, one of the Centre’s key priorities.”
The December session of Council also had the task of appointing five new members to the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC). The SAC is one of the six advisory bodies that assist the Council. Its role is to make recommendations about the Centre’s research plans and to review outcomes.
Members tend to be very familiar with ECMWF’s work and staff, through research projects, workshops and conferences, and usually hold one formal meeting a year to review plans and progress. Their expertise covers a broad range of the disciplines relating to the Centre’s work.
The new SAC members join the seven existing members of the Committee, all scientists from ECMWF’s Member States serving in their personal capacity. Professor Alan O'Neill is the new Chair and Professor Wilco Hazeleger the new Vice-Chair, for one year from 2 December.
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Professor Alan O'Neill became Chair of the SAC in December 2016. He is Professor of Meteorology (Emeritus) at the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, and Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Scientific Computing, the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK. |
Welcoming the appointments, ECMWF Director of Research Professor Erland Källén said: “The new members bring a wealth of experience in their respective fields, from ensemble forecasting to ocean modelling, data assimilation, and physical parametrizations. Their insights will help us to achieve the ambitious goals set in ECMWF’s new ten-year Strategy, which emphasises the need to focus on ensemble forecasting and to better represent interactions between different components of the Earth system.”
Dr Susanna Corti is an expert in the area of extended-range forecasting and large-scale atmospheric dynamics. She is a senior scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).
Dr Inger-Lise Frogner is a senior scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Her main area of research is ensemble forecasting, in particular as project leader within the HIRLAM consortium.
Professor Pier Siebesma works at Delft University in the Netherlands as a part-time professor and at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) as chair of the mesoscale modelling cluster. His area of expertise is physical parametrizations dealing with clouds, turbulence and mesoscale dynamics.
Professor Gunilla Svensson has spent most of her career at Stockholm University, Sweden, and her main area of research is cloud and boundary layer parametrizations in NWP and climate models.
Dr Anthony Weaver is a data assimilation specialist at the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation (CERFACS) in Toulouse, France. His main areas of research are ocean modelling and data assimilation.