The SAC provides the Council with opinions and recommendations on the draft programme of activities of the Centre drawn up by the Director-General and on any other matters submitted by the Council. The members of the SAC are appointed in their personal capacity and are selected from among the scientists of the Member States.
Next session
6-8 October 2025
SAC members and Experts
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Professor Dr Thomas Jung Chair |
Alfred Wegener Institute and Professor for Physics of the Climate System (Theory and Modelling), University of Bremen Profile Prof Thomas Jung in an expert in climate analysis, modelling and prediction from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. He has received his PhD 2000 in atmospheric physics from University of Kiel and the Institute for Marine Research (now GEOMAR). He then went on to work for 10 years in the Research Department of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK. Prof Jung is head of the Climate Dynamics section at AWI and full professor for physics of the climate system at the University of Bremen. He is also spokesperson of AWI’s research programme. Furthermore, he acts as the chair of various committees, including the Polar Prediction Project of the World Meteorological Organisation. Prof Jung coordinates major research projects such as APPLICATE, which is funded through the Horizon2020 program, and Advanced Earth System Modelling Capacity, which is funded through the Helmholtz Association. |
Dr Selime Gürol |
Senior Researcher, CERFACS, Toulouse Profile My main research areas include data assimilation, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning. I dedicate 20% of my time to a secondment at ANITI (Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute), contributing to the RELEO (Representation Learning for Earth Observation) project. I supervise PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working on advanced numerical algorithms, including preconditioning and randomized algorithms for data assimilation, as well as hybrid data assimilation and machine learning algorithms. Additionally, I teach Inverse Problems and Data Assimilation at ISAE and CERFACS. I am actively involved in coding, particularly in OOPS (Object-Oriented Prediction System) and Python including variational and sequential data assimilation. |
Dr Henk Eskes |
Senior scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Netherlands Profile The research of Dr Eskes focuses on the composition of the atmosphere. He is an expert on atmospheric chemistry modelling, chemical data assimilation and satellite observations of trace gases in the atmosphere. Henk Eskes is strongly involved in the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), implemented by ECMWF, and was involved in the European research projects MACC and GEMS preparing for the CAMS operational service. He is currently the coordinator of the CAMS validation contract, leading a consortium of 14 partners. He is also product lead for the NO2 product of TROPOMI on the Sentinel-5P satellite and involved in the preparation for Sentinels 4 and 5. |
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Dr Christina Koepken-Watts |
Data assimilation section, German Weather Service, Germany Profile Dr Köpken-Watts is the scientific team leader for satellite data assimilation within the data assimilation section of the German Weather Service (DWD). Her main development focus is the use of satellite radiances. She is also the project team leader for DWD within the NWP SAF cooperation with the Met Office, Météo-France and ECMWF. She graduated in Meteorology and received her PhD from the University of Bonn (Germany), her Diplom and PhD research including an extended research visit at LMD (Paris) and co-operation with University of Bergen and the NMI (MET Norway) in the areas of satellite retrievals and satellite retrieval assimilation for polar low simulations, respectively. Joining DWD she worked within the European funded BALTEX project on regional re-analysis for the Baltic area as well as the use of rain radar observations and ground-based GPS data, a new data source in meteorology at the time. She went on to work for three years in the research department of ECMWF as a EUMETSAT fellow for the assimilation of geostationary radiances. After returning to DWD, her main research focus is the use of microwave and infrared satellite radiances for operational NWP, but she also contributed to work on scatterometer winds and atmospheric motion vectors. Dr Köpken-Watts is a member of the EUMETSAT science working group (STG-SWG) and of the IRS mission advisory group (IRSMAG). |
Dr Louise Nuijens |
Associate Professor in Atmospheric science, GRS, TU Delft Profile With my research group I study physical processes involved in the interaction of convection and clouds with atmospheric winds and circulations using field observations, high-resolution simulations and theory. A strong focus is on physical interactions at horizontal scales smaller than 100 km. We are particularly interested in the impact of such physical interactions on air-sea coupling, regional weather and climate. |
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Prof Dr Nedjeljka Žagar
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Atmospheric Dynamics and Predictability Group, University of Hamburg Profile Nedjeljka Žagar is a professor of theoretical meteorology at the University of Hamburg where she leads the Atmospheric Dynamics and Predictability Group https://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/en/arbeitsgruppen/theoretische-meteorologie.html. Her research addresses topics in large-scale dynamics, data assimilation and predictability focusing on the tropics. Her group develops reduced-complexity models for studying dynamics and data assimilation and maintains the MODES webpage https://modes.cen.uni-hamburg.de for real-time scale- and dynamical-regime decomposition of the ECMWF model outputs. Nedjeljka received her PhD in dynamical meteorology in 2004, from the Meteorological Institute of Stockholm University, Sweden, on tropical data assimilation modelling and the potential impact of the Aeolus wind satellite. She then went on to become assistant professor at the Department of Physics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she advanced to an associate and full professor of meteorology. Her postdoctoral fellowship was awarded by the Advanced Study Program of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Early in her career, she was an active member of the international ALADIN model development team at the Croatian weather service and worked on mesoscale NWP applications. Nedjeljka's research has been funded by the European Research Council and European Space Agency, among others. She has two decades of active collaboration with the ECMWF scientists on topics in dynamics, data assimilation and predictability. |
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Dr Oliver Fuhrer
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Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss Profile Oliver Fuhrer is head of the division Numerical Prediction (30 staff) at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss. In this role is is responsible for the development and operation of the suite of numerical weather prediction models for Switzerland. Oliver Fuhrer is Senior Director of Climate Modeling at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit philanthropy of Microsoft co-founder Paul G Allen. There he is currently incubating a high-risk, high-reward research effort (16 staff) Oliver Fuhrer’s research background is in convection-resolving modeling of weather and climate as well as computational science and high-performance computing. He has further been actively involved in research related to air quality modeling, modeling of the atmospheric boundary layer, numerical methods for fluid dynamics, and data assimilation. |
Prof Thomas Spengler |
Professor, Dynamic Meteorology, Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, Norway Profile Prof Spengler is a meteorologist focusing on the combination of theory, observations, and modeling. He studied at the University of Munich, Germany, finishing his Diploma in 2005 and obtained his PhD in 2008 from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After a two year postdoc at Princeton University and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, he became professor at the University of Bergen in 2010. He has specialized on a variety of scales ranging from meso, synoptic, to large-scale flow and participated in several field campaigns addressing meso-scale atmospheric flow and atmosphere-ocean interactions. Since 2015, he has been the director of the Norwegian Research School on Changing Climates in the Coupled Earth System (CHESS). His specific research interests are devoted to interaction processes between different space and time scales as well as interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. Since 2012 he has been an elected member of the International Commission for Dynamic Meteorology and was elected president of ICDM in 2019, re-elected in 2023. Spengler was awarded the award for best lecturer of the academic year 2012/2013 at the Faculty for Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Bergen and nominated for the IAMAS early career scientist medal in 2013. From 2013 to 2021, Spengler was a delegate of the Atmospheric Working Group of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and was elected as chair from 2015 until 2019. Since 2024, he has been a member of the WWRP PDEF working group as well as of the Mission Advisory Group of the ESA Earth Explorer 11 mission WIVERN. |
Prof Richard E Turner |
Professor of Machine Learning, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge Profile Prof Richard E Turner is Professor of Machine Learning in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge and Research Lead, AI for Weather Prediction, at the Alan Turing Institute. Prof Turner led the Aardvark Weather project on end-to-end medium-range weather forecasting. Richard’s previous roles include Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research in the AI4Science and AI teams where he co-led the Aurora project that built a foundation model for the Earth System. Richard is the Cambridge Lead for the EPSRC Probabilistic AI Hub, a £8 million initiative into probabilistic machine learning methods. He was also Co-Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in the Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER CDT). He has received over £35 million of funding as a Principal or Co-Investigator. He has been awarded the Cambridge Students' Union Teaching Award for Lecturing. |
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Prof Simon Vosper |
Executive Director of Science, UK Met Office Profile As the Director of Science at the Met Office I am a member of the Executive leadership team, and along with my fellow Executive directors, am responsible for the development and implementation of Met Office Corporate and Research and Innovation strategies. I am also responsible for the delivery of the scientific capabilities enabled by our current and future supercomputing capability. |
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Dr Isabel Trigo |
IPMA, Portugal Profile Isabel Trigo graduated in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and received her the PhD degree from the University of East Anglia (UK). Dr Trigo initiated her research career in the area of climate variability, studying synoptic systems in mid-latitudes. She briefly worked as a visiting scientist at ECMWF, where she started exploring satellite data to assess the land surface scheme. Currently, Dr Trigo is a senior researcher at Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera, IPMA (Portugal), where she leads the Remote Sensing Group. Her research focuses on applications of remote sensing observations to derive land surface variables, and on their use to better understand and model land surface processes. She is the Scientific Coordinator for the EUMETSAT Satellite Applications Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) and has acted as local PI for several international products funded by ESA, and by Copernicus and European Programmes. |
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Dr François Bouyssel Vice Chair |
NWP group, Météo-FranceProfile François currently leads the numerical weather prediction (NWP) research group at Météo-France in charge of maintaining and developing the global (Arpege) and regional (Arome) operational numerical weather forecasting systems of Météo-France and of conducting research which prepares future versions. This mission is carried out in an environment of strong international cooperation. These NWP systems are based on a computer code common to many services in Europe, such as ECMWF and ACCORD consortium. Previously, François was leading the team in charge of the representation of atmospheric and surface physical processes in operational NWP systems developed at Météo-France. The team has contributed to the development of a new prognostic moist physics common for NWP and Climat versions of the global model and of the prototype and the first operational versions of a kilometric-scale NWP regional model (Arome). At the beginning of his career, he performed research activities on the assimilation of surface parameters for continental surfaces in NWP systems, in the continuation of his PhD on developing a variational analysis of superficial soil moisture and temperature from screen level atmospheric parameters. He was also involved in the development of linearized physical parametrizations for the 4DVar analysis of the global NWP system and of an optimal interpolation analysis for surface and upper-air parameters for nowcasting at regional scales. His research activities are on modelling of atmospheric physical processes (microphysics, convection, orographic gravity wave drag) at different spatial and temporal scales.
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