The WeatherPod (13 – 18)

Michael is the Director of the Central Institute of Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), which is Austria’s national meteorological & hydrological service. He is also the Permanent Representative of Austria to the World Meteorological Organisation, and President of the WMO Regional Association VI (Europe).

Catalina coordinates the Forecast-based Financing concept worldwide for the Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre and provides technical support for national Red Cross societies.

Forecast-based Financing is a highly innovative way of applying weather forecasts. The aim is to enhance humanitarian action to protect lives and livelihoods by making resources available to act before a disaster actually occurs.

Catalina also leads on knowledge management for the UK-supported Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience programme, working with stakeholders on science and solutions to improve risk assessment, preparedness, early action and resilience.

As well as her huge experience in the humanitarian sector, with the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, UN agencies and others, Catalina has a background in industrial engineering, a master’s degree in humanitarian action, and a Doctorate in Early Warning and Early Action in conflict-affected contexts.

In this pilot episode, co-presenters Alan Thorpe and David Rogers talk to Dr. David Parsons about the role of the academic sector. David is Professor Emeritus of the Oklahoma University Department of Meteorology and, until 2018, the Director of the School of Meteorology at Oklahoma University.

This is the second episode of The WeatherPod produced in collaboration with the Young Earth System Scientists (YESS) Community.

Dr Nina Ridder is a Research Associate at the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC), University of New South Wales.

Nina joined the Centre in the beginning of 2019. Her work focuses on compound climate and weather extremes, and extreme precipitation. As such, Nina addresses the occurrence of multiple natural hazards that have been associated to the most severe socio-economic damages in New South Wales over the past decades.

She uses multivariate statistics to determine any statistical dependency and correlation between hazards and aims to identify the physical processes driving multiple hazards. I In detail, this includes the statistical relationship between precipitation, wind, and high temperatures as well as the occurrence of sequences of two or more east-coast low pressure systems hitting NSW.

Additionally to her work focusing on NSW, Nina also investigates multivariate hazards on the global scale to establish possible spatio-temporal links between different regions and their natural hazards around the world.

Dr Faith Taylor is a physical geographer with interests in geographic information systems (GIS), spatial modelling, statistics and natural hazards. She is a Lecturer in Physical Geography Education in the Department of Geography.

Faith has a MSc in Environmental Modelling, Monitoring and Management and a PhD from King’s College London. Her PhD thesis focused on statistical patterns in triggered landslide event inventories and the development of a landslide road impact model.

Between 2015 and 2017, she undertook two post-doctoral research positions at King’s College London, with a focus on hazard and risk in towns and cities in the Global South. These projects were ‘Urban Africa Risk Knowledge’ and ‘Why we Disagree about Resilience’.

Between 2017 and 2019 she was a Lecturer in Geographic Information System (GIS) at the University of Portsmouth.

During her PhD and postdoctoral research at King’s, she co-founded Intrepid Explorers, which is a platform to promote the value of field-based research in education and inspire others to do safe and impactful field research. With colleagues, she also established King’s Humanitarian Mappers, which is a group of staff and students who run ‘mapathons’ (mapping marathons) to put remote and vulnerable places on maps that are available to all.

Both Nina and Faith are members of the Young Earth System Scientists community, (YESS).

Christoph is a member of the senior management team at the Swiss weather services company, meteoblue, and was a lead researcher for the recent World Bank report on ‘The Power of Partnership: Public and Private Engagement in Hydromet Services’.

About the WeatherPod
Alan Thorpe is an atmospheric scientist who has worked as a Professor of Meteorology, as head of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and, most recently, as Director General of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.

David Rogers is an oceanographer turned meteorologist, a former Chief Executive of the UK Met Office and now a consultant with the World Bank helping countries improve their weather, hydrological and disaster management systems and services.

Weather information is an international resource critical to saving lives, making business and society more efficient, and building resilience to the growing impacts of extreme weather & climate change.

Each month, WeatherPod will explore how the public, private and academic sectors – which make up what’s informally called the Global Weather Enterprise – co-operate to produce weather information and make it widely available. It will also examine how weather affected public and private enterprises actually use it.

Extreme weather often impacts the poorest the hardest. So the WeatherPod will look beyond the wealthier countries to the poorer and less developed ones – which host most of the world’s population – to examine how the rich and poor use weather & climate information – the differences, the things in common, and the lessons we can learn from each other.

In this episode, co-presenters Alan Thorpe and David Rogers talk to hugely experienced broadcast meteorologist, Gerald Fleming.