ECMWF Fellowship awarded to Louise Nuijens

ECMWF has appointed three scientists working in the fields of data assimilation, atmospheric physics and hydrometeorology to its Fellowship programme. Dr Louise Nuijens (TU Delft), Prof. Marc Bocquet (École des Ponts ParisTech) and Dr Maria-Helena Ramos (Irstea) begin their three-year Fellowship terms on 1 January 2019.

The ECMWF Fellowship Programme was launched in 2014 to foster collaboration with renowned international scientists. Each of the new Fellows has been selected because of their expertise in their respective field and because their scientific work is closely related to ECMWF’s strategic goal of improving weather forecast skill in the medium and extended range.

Louise Nuijens

Louise Nuijens is an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences and Remote Sensing at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.

Her group explores the role of convective clouds in atmospheric processes, with a special focus on how they influence the winds that carry them around.

Previously, Louise worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences at MIT in Boston, and as a group leader of the Observations and Process Studies group in the Atmosphere Department of the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Louise already has strong connections with ECMWF, having co-authored papers with ECMWF scientists and given presentations as part of ECMWF’s Annual Seminar and informal seminar series.During her Fellowship, Louise will work with scientists from the Physical Processes Team of ECMWF’s Research Department. One potential area of collaboration involves momentum transport in the presence of moist convection. This is related to the work of Louise and her group in the CloudBrake project, funded by the European Research Council, which strives to expose the coupling of clouds and the vertical structure of wind, thereby aiding development of parametrizations for improved numerical weather prediction, climate modelling, and wind energy design.