The WeatherPod (19 – 24)

Paul has a number of years experience in meteorology and is now recognized nationally and internationally as an authority in the field of operational meteorology.

As Principal Fellow, Paul will ensure the Met Office’s professional and cultural approach to weather forecasting is globally recognized and to head a respected and valuable operational meteorological profession. He will spearhead the innovation and use of new scientific, technological, and operational techniques to deliver impact and benefit to a wide range of customers. Paul will also be the external figurehead for all things to do with the meteorological profession be this with stakeholders or key customers.

Paul was a Chief Forecaster in 2003 before being appointed as the Chief Hydrometeorologist and Deputy Head of the Flood Forecasting Center in 2008. From 2010, he created the Met Office’s Hazards Center and was the founder and inaugural Chair of the Natural Hazards Partnership (NHP) comprising a number of partner agencies, government departments and the Cabinet Office.

Paul was the lead author to WMO’s Multi-Hazard Impact Based Forecasting and Risk Based Warnings guidelines in his capacity as WMO’s IMPACT task team chair. Paul later became UK representative on the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) OPAG Management group for GDPFS ensuring the flow of data and advice is cascaded between global, regional, and national systems.

Tim is an eminent research scientist in weather and climate prediction and predictability. He has worked at the Met Office, at ECMWF and now is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford.

He is well known as an architect of ensemble weather prediction, but he is a polymath with interests across fundamental physics and maths. In his book ‘The Primacy of Doubt’ Tim discusses how incorporating uncertainty appropriately in the form of (random) noise into simulations and models of a range of natural phenomena, including weather and climate, is fundamental to improving the predictions of future behavior, i.e. the weather forecast.

Dr Shipra Jain (University of Edinburgh – climate science) is a physicist by training and particularly interested in how society can benefit from improved knowledge of extremes. She conducts research to advance the physical understanding and early prediction of weather and climate extremes. For the last five years, she is working on the development of physical-mathematical frameworks that can be used to quantify the chance of record-breaking rainfall for the next season to next decades.
Shipra has worked on diverse climate science-related topics including seasonal predictions, monsoon dynamics, stratospheric tropospheric processes, climate change and variability, climate extremes, and air pollution. She has collaborated with > 60 co-authors across different countries, organizations, and career stages. Very recently, she has joined the Centre for Climate Research Singapore, where she works on the seasonal and subseasonal forecasting and development of forecast products for Singapore and South-East Asia.

Dr Marisol Osman (research scientist at CIMA/University of Buenos Aires – Meteorology/climatology) is a postdoctoral researcher working at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Coming from a town of farmers, she was always interested in how climate variability affects agricultural activity. During her Diploma and PhD, which she completed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she worked on climate predictability and prediction on seasonal timescales over the Southern Hemisphere and South America. During her postdoc, she developed a probabilistic seasonal forecasting system for South America that is now used by the Argentinian Weather Service. As a researcher, she worked on interdisciplinary projects with anthropologists, economists as well as farmers to co-design and co-produce forecasting tools for the agricultural sector on subseasonal and seasonal timescales. Now at KIT she studies the predictability of different variables relevant for the energy sector on weather and subseasonal timescales.

About the guests

Haleh Kootval

Haleh joined the World Bank as a senior consulting specialist in meteorology and service delivery in April 2017. She has been working in countries in South Asia, Central and East Europe, the Caribbean and Africa on hydromet modernization projects, as project team leader for a modernization project to Government of Bangladesh and as a senior service delivery expert to the Government of Laos. Prior to that, Haleh worked in WMO as the Chief of the Public Weather Services Program, which she developed and led until her departure from WMO. She has co-authored and edited more than 30 publications on various aspects of service delivery with a focus on public weather services. Prior to joining WMO, Haleh served as the Head of the Brunei Meteorological Service and the Permanent Representative of Brunei with WMO, the President of WMO Regional Association for Asia and Southwest Pacific, and as a member of the WMO Executive Council. Haleh is a physics graduate of the Imperial College of London University and completed her post graduate studies in geophysics.

Gerald Fleming

Gerald is a graduate from UCD Physics in 1978 (B.Sc) and 1980 (M.Sc), Gerald Fleming worked 37 years for Met Éireann as a weather forecaster and weather broadcaster, leading the TV weather team and spending 9 years as Head of Forecasting. For WMO he chaired the Programme on Public Weather Services for 15 years. He now works as a meteorological consultant on a variety of WMO and World Bank development projects in South Asia and in Africa. He received the European Meteorological Society’s Silver Medal, their highest honour, in 2019.

Kevin O’Loughlin

Kevin is a meteorologist with extensive experience in Australia and internationally in operations, policy and leadership . He is a former State Director and national Deputy Director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology responsible for the Bureau’s service delivery functions, including public weather services, severe weather services, aviation and defence services, and climate services. He also served for four years as CEO of an Australian/New Zealand wildfire research centre. Internationally, Kevin was involved as an expert in the development and implementation of the WMO Public Weather Services Programme from its inception in the mid 1990’s. He served as chairman of the Programme’s for several years. His other international experience includes a variety of consultancy tasks for WMO involving projects in developing countries in Africa, leadership training workshops, and official WMO guidance material.

Societies are increasingly challenged by the need to cope with complex interconnected threats. Either a single hazard leads to a cascade of additional perils, often more significant effects than the primary one, or multiple independent hazards occur simultaneously. In each case, lack of planning and early preparation leads to the realisation of major adverse impacts on people and their livelihoods. Economic development may falter, and political instability becomes an added risk.

Climate change compounds existing threats and poses new ones; many, outside the bounds of experience, require us to harness new knowledge and take a more holistic view of the immediate and future risks facing us. The problem affects all of society and a “whole of society” approach is needed. This is immensely challenging. Societal compacts and partnerships among more than a few groups of stakeholders are rarely sustained and we proceed with compartmentalised approaches where each sector attempts to solve its own problems with little or no insight into how sectoral interdependencies compound and exacerbate risks or how to reduce them.

Two key concepts have emerged in the past decade as the means to improve people’s ability to handle different types of hazards – Anticipatory action and impact-based forecasting. Anticipatory action is a set of actions people can take to prevent harm to themselves and others before acute impacts are felt. Impact-based forecasts focus on what the hazard will do rather than what the hazard will be. In practice, anticipatory action and impact-based forecasts are complementary. Neither is effective without the other. “Good forecast but shame about the outcome” is a repeated mantra. So, for those impacts of hazards for which anticipatory action driven largely or in part by weather forecasts would make a difference, what isn’t being done right?

About the guests:

Irene Amuron, Head of Anticipatory Action, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Irene is the Head of Anticipatory Action at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and the focal person for Learning and Guidance at the Anticipation Hub.

She is a technical expert in the field of disaster risk management, whose expertise includes specialist support to National Societies and partners on Anticipatory Action. Irene has over 15 years of experience in Disaster Risk Reduction and formerly served as the Manager, Disaster Risk Reduction with the Uganda Red Cross Society before joining the Climate Centre.

Irene was among the pioneers of the Forecast-based Financing approach in Uganda and has worked extensively in Africa, supporting the implementation of Anticipatory Action. She advocates for the value of the impact-based forecasting approach to weather and climate service delivery. She also supports research on anticipatory action/forecast based financing in collaboration with universities, including the University of Reading, UK.

Irene is currently undertaking her Ph.D. at the University of Twente, Netherlands, focusing on the impacts of Heatwaves in East Africa. Irene is passionate about building the collaboration and capacities of communities and national entities to address the impacts of climate change.

Paul Davies, Met Office Principal Fellow, Meteorology and Chief Meteorologist.

Paul has a number of years experience in meteorology and is now recognised nationally and internationally as an authority in the field of operational meteorology.

As Principal Fellow, Paul will ensure the Met Office’s professional and cultural approach to weather forecasting is globally recognised and to head a respected and valuable operational meteorological profession. He will spearhead the innovation and use of new scientific, technological and operational techniques to deliver impact and benefit to a wide range of customers. Paul will also be the external figurehead for all things to do with the meteorological profession be this with stakeholders or key customers.

Paul was a Chief Forecaster in 2003 before being appointed as the Chief Hydrometeorologist and Deputy Head of the Flood Forecasting Centre in 2008. From 2010, he created the Met Office’s Hazards Centre and was the founder and inaugural Chair of the Natural Hazards Partnership (NHP) comprising a number of partner agencies, government departments and the Cabinet Office. Paul was the lead author to WMO’s Multi-Hazard Impact Based Forecasting and Risk Based Warnings guidelines in his capacity as WMO’s IMPACT task team chair. Paul later became UK representative on the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) OPAG Management group for GDPFS ensuring the flow of data and advice is cascaded between global, regional and national systems.

Terrence Fernando, Director of the THINKlab, University of Salford

Professor Terrence Fernando is the Director of the THINKlab(www.thinklab.salford.ac.uk), at the University of Salford in the UK, which is an interdisciplinary research centre focusing on developing technology solutions for the global challenges faced by society, industry and government organisations.

He has extensive experience in leading international research teams for producing innovative solutions in areas such as aerospace, space, built environment and disaster resilience. He led the MOBILISE project (mobilise.thinklab-salford.org) and the TRANSCEND project (www.transcend-project.org.uk), funded by the Global Challenges Research Funds (GCRF), and worked with organisations in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia to develop digital solutions that can support multi-agency collaboration in building resilience against hazards such as floods and landslides.

He was also the technical lead for the Greater Manchester Resilience Forum Innovation project (gmrf.mobilise-project.org.uk/) which developed three digital demonstrators for strengthening community engagement, multi-agency collaboration, and training and exercise. As a part of the world Bank funded Climate Innovation Challenge Innovation Pilot (kalutara.mobilise-srilanka.org), he was instrumental in establishing a Living Lab (Urban Laboratory) in the Kalutara District in Sri Lanka to implement a multi-agency approach to building local resilience against climate change.

Hosts David Rogers and Alan Thorpe delve into the ECMWF’s use of AI and how this may impact it’s future products and services, especially when it comes to their use in the developing countries by meteorological services and other customers.

Florian leads the ECMWF’s Forecast Department which is responsible for the production of weather forecasts, forecast quality control, and the development of novel forecast products.

ECMWF has for a while been experimenting with using deep learning to produce a data-based AI weather prediction model and last October Florian played a key role in the launch of the Artificial Intelligence / Integrated Forecasting System. This is the ECMWF’s first forecasting system incorporating a machine learning prediction module.