About Rutger Dankers

Rutger works on the impacts of climate change on permafrost and hydrology.

Areas of expertise:

• Climate impacts on high latitude ecosystems
• Impacts on flood and drought hazards and risks
• Large-scale hydrological modelling

Publications by Rutger Dankers

Current activities

Rutger is currently working in a collaborative project with scientists from the  State Hydrological Institute in St Petersburg, Russia, looking at uncertainties in the permafrost response to climate change. To this end, he is evaluating and applying the  JULES using probabilistic climate scenarios. He is also involved in the European research projects Quantifying the carbon budget in Northern Russia: past, present and future (Carbo-North), studying ecosystem changes in northern Eurasia using the coupled climate-carbon cycle HadCM3C model, and Water and Global Change (WATCH), in which he is evaluating JULES with regard to the simulation of hydrology and river discharge in high latitude basins.

Career background

Before joining the Met Office in 2009, Rutger worked for three years at the  Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) in Ispra, Italy. Here he studied the impact of climate change on river floods and streamflow droughts at European scale. Before that, he worked as a post-doc at the  University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in the European FP5 project Global Change Vulnerabilities in the Barents Region: Linking Arctic Natural Resources, Climate Change and Economies (BALANCE) in which he was modelling freshwater discharge in the Barents Sea Region. Rutger obtained his PhD from the same university with a study on climate impacts on sub-Arctic hydrology.