Steering group

Lead coordinators:

  • Sandrine Bony (LMD/IPSL, France, bony @ lmd.jussieu.fr)
    Sandrine Bony is a CNRS senior research scientist at Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) in Paris. Her research aims at understanding the role of clouds in climate and in climate change through modeling, observational and theoretical approaches. She is a co-chair of the WCRP Working Group on Coupled Models (WGCM) and has long been involved in the Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project (CFMIP).
  • Bjorn Stevens (MPI-M, Germany, bjorn.stevens @ mpimet.mpg.de)
    Bjorn Stevens is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology where he leads the department The Atmosphere in The Earth System.  His research uses a mix of tools on a variety of scales to understand the role of clouds and moist processes in the climate system.

Initiative coordinators:

Initiative on Climate and hydrological sensitivity
  • Steven Sherwood (Univ. New South Wales, Australia, s.sherwood @ unsw.edu.au)
    Prof. Steven Sherwood is the director of the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW.  He uses theory and observation to better understand interactions across scales in the atmosphere, with a particular emphasis on phenomena related to humidity and convection and how they will behave in different climates, convective dynamics, and climate feedbacks.
  • Mark Webb (MetOffice, UK, mark.webb @ metoffice.gov.uk)
    Mark Webb is a research scientist in the Met Office Hadley Centre where he works on understanding the physical mechanisms responsible for cloud adjustments, cloud feedbacks and the changing hydrological cycle.  Mark has been co-chair of CFMIP since 2006.
Initiative on Leveraging the past record
  • Masa Kageyama (LSCE/IPSL, France, Masa.Kageyama @ lsce.ipsl.fr)
    Masa Kageyama is a research scientist at Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat de l'Environnement (LSCE/IPSL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France). Her work deals with understanding paleoclimates, and in particular the climate of the last glacial period, by modelling these climates and comparing model results with paleo-climatic and paleo-environmental reconstructions. She has been an active participant to the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) since 1995.
  • Robert Pincus (CIRES/NOAA, USA, Robert.Pincus @ Colorado.EDU)
    Robert Pincus is a research scientist at the University of Colorado with links to the NOAA Earth System Research Lab. He works on problems related to clouds and radiation, including the measurement of cloud properties using remote sensing observations, the representation of clouds and their interaction with radiation in atmospheric models at all scales, and the use of cloud observations in model assessment and data assimilation.
Initiative on Coupling clouds to circulations
  • Pier Siebesma (KNMI, Netherlands, siebesma @ knmi.nl)
    Prof. dr. Pier Siebesma is senior scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and a part-time professor at the Technical University of Delft. His main interests are in the understanding, modeling and the parameterization of cloud related processes for weather and climate. He is currently the coordinator of the EU project EUCLIPSE on cloud-climate feedbacks.
  • Dargan Frierson (University of Washington, USA, dargan @ atmos.washington.edu)
    Dargan Frierson is an associate professor at the University of Washington, he has made fundamental contribution to our understanding of the interplay of clouds, convection and large-scale circulations through the use of a hierarchy of models.
Initiative on Changing patterns
  • Ted Shepherd (Univ. Reading, UK, theodore.shepherd @ reading.ac.uk)
    Ted Shepherd is Grantham Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading. Up to 2012 he worked at the University of Toronto where his research ranged from fundamental geophysical fluid dynamics to chemistry-climate modelling of the middle atmosphere. His interests are now more focused on the troposphere and related to understanding uncertainty in large-scale atmospheric circulation.
  • Adam Sobel (Univ. Columbia, USA, ahs129 @ columbia.edu)
    Adam Sobel is a Professor at Columbia University. His research is in atmospheric and climate dynamics, with emphases on the tropics and the role of cumulus convection on large scales. Specific current interests include the Madden-Julian oscillation, tropical cyclones, severe convection over land, and the relation of all of these to global climate.
Initiative: Towards more reliable models
  • Christian Jakob (Monash Univ., Australia, christian.jakob @ monash.edu)
    Christian Jakob is the Chair of Climate Modelling at Monash University. His research interests lie in the improvement of the representation of clouds and tropical convection in weather and climate models. He exploits a variety of process-oriented observations to better understand the underlying processes and to inform his model development activities. He is the Co-Chair of the WCRP Modelling Advisory Panel (WMAC).
  • Masahiro Watanabe (Univ. Tokyo, Japan, hiro @ aori.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
    Masahiro Watanabe is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. He has lead model development for a Japanese community climate model, and his reserach interests span from cloud feedback in climate change to dynamics of natural climate variability, with particular focus on the role of coupled atmosphere-ocean processes therein.