HITS researcher Sebastian Lerch appointed ECMWF Fellow

Sebastian Lerch, junior research group leader at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and visiting scientist in the Computational Statistics (CST) group at HITS, has been appointed as a Fellow by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

The ECMWF Fellowship program fosters links between ECMWF and individual scientists carrying out pioneering work in areas relevant to ECMWF’s strategic goals.  “The overarching aim of my collaboration within the fellowship is to advance the use of methods from artificial intelligence and machine learning for improving the accuracy and reliability of probabilistic weather forecasts on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales”, Sebastian Lerch says. Specifically, this will include the curation and development of joint datasets and testbeds to systematically evaluate and compare existing post-processing models from the groups at both ECMWF and KIT.

In the ten years since its launch, ECMWF collaborations with current and former Fellows have contributed significantly to progress in global Earth system modeling. Areas of joint work have included data assimilation, novel numerical methods, the atmospheric water cycle, predictability, and the calibration and post-processing of forecasts. One of the first ECMWF fellows was Tilmann Gneiting, CST group leader and current HITS Scientific Director.