ECMWF Director-General Florence Rabier and the Anemoi Framework on machine learning, in which ECMWF plays a leading role, will each receive a prestigious award from the European Meteorological Society (EMS).
Florence will receive the EMS Silver Medal 2025, and the Anemoi Framework, a European collaboration to create machine learning (ML) weather forecasting systems, will receive the EMS Technology Achievement Award 2025.
The Silver Medal ceremony, which includes a Silver Medal Lecture by Florence, will be held during the Annual Meeting of the EMS in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 7–12 September 2025.
The Technology Achievement Award will be presented to the partners of Anemoi at the Awards Session during the same meeting.
The Silver Medal
The decision to award Florence the Silver Medal recognises her great contribution to numerical weather prediction (NWP), in particular in her role as Director-General of ECMWF since January 2016.
“Florence Rabier is honoured for her ground-breaking scientific, academic and leadership career, marked by pioneering contributions to variational data assimilation of satellite observations in NWP, and her proactive role positioning ECMWF at the forefront of the machine learning revolution,” the EMS explains.
It highlights Florence’s “exceptional scientific, academic and leadership career” and her “highly influential and distinguished contributions to the development of meteorology in Europe and worldwide”.
Florence said: “I am personally extremely humbled to receive this award, and I proudly accept it on behalf of all the fantastic people at ECMWF and in all the Met services and organisations around the world working in numerical weather prediction.”
The EMS Silver Medal was established in 2008 to highlight distinguished contributions to the development of meteorology in Europe. The Award is presented annually.
The Technology Achievement Award
The EMS highlights the collaborative dimension of Anemoi in explaining why it awarded Anemoi the EMS Technology Achievement Award.
"The Anemoi Framework is an excellent example of a European collaborative effort, which offers enhanced forecast accuracy through the use of advanced machine-learning methodologies. The flexible open-source approach enables various European stakeholders to further integrate AI in operational forecasting,” the EMS says.
It emphasises that Anemoi is “designed to enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility of data-driven weather forecasting” through building upon “advanced ML techniques and a modular, open-source architecture to democratize access to cutting-edge forecasting tools.”
The award is going to 14 organisations, including ECMWF, and key individuals in them. At ECMWF, we have already taken the Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) into operations. Anemoi generalised what started as an AIFS codebase to allow wider functionality for a greater set of users, from large meteorological services to master’s students.
The EMS Technology Achievement Award seeks to recognise achievements that are influential on developments of technologies and technical solutions in meteorology and related areas. The Award is normally presented annually.