ECMWF's Council has appointed the current Deputy Director-General and Director of Forecasts and Services, Florian Pappenberger, as the Centre's next Director-General from 1 January 2026. He will take over the post from Florence Rabier, who has served as ECMWF's Director-General since 2016 and will retire at the end of 2025.
Florian Pappenberger has been ECMWF's Deputy Director-General since 2021 and has led the Centre's forecasting operations for nine years. In these roles, he has focused on the needs of Member and Co-operating States and the wider user community and has driven technological innovation. Florian has championed ECMWF's AI and machine learning activities, recently guiding the operationalisation of the Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) alongside implementations of traditional physics-based models. For more details, see the article published on the ECMWF website: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/next-director-general-ecmwf-will-drive-innovation-and-collaboration.