Dr Emilie Vanvyve

Areas of expertise

• Climate modelling (regional, land-atmosphere interactions, climate change)
• Applied climate and weather research
• Data science
• Environmental weather- or climate-related issues across sectors (such as air quality, reinsurance, transport, energy, environment, defence)

Email: [email protected]

Current activities

Emilie has many years of experience working in applied weather/climate research within customer-focussed organisations in private and public sectors. Passionate about transforming research concepts into services that directly benefit the public, she currently leads the multidisciplinary ‘Research to Applications’ team in the Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence and the Informatics Lab. Her work focuses on utilising data science to transform our understanding of a changing environment and to find solutions to the challenges that it presents.

Career background

Emilie obtained her PhD in physics in 2007 from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. Her PhD was centred on the regional climate modelling of the West African monsoon, with a particular focus on land-atmosphere interactions, rainfall at the intra/interannual time scales and recent severe droughts.

After her PhD, Emilie worked for several years in a scientific consultancy company (Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants, Cambridge, UK) as a Scientific Consultant, where she contributed to the development of the ADMS suite of atmospheric dispersion models for industrial, urban and airport air quality management.

Emilie then spent several years as an Associate Scientist III for the Research Applications Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A. She worked there on pioneering a new analog-ensemble technique for assessing the wind resource of candidate wind-farm sites.

Emilie moved back to Europe and joined the Met Office in 2014 as a Senior Scientist in Applied Science. Emilie spent most of her time in the Science for Impacts, Resilience and Adaptation team, working towards understanding the needs of customers across multiple sectors in relation to weather and climate (reinsurance, transport, energy, environment) and developing climate services to meet those requirements. Emilie progressed to a science manager role in the Defence Applications team before joining the Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence and the Informatics Lab team in 2020 to lead the team on data science ‘Research to Applications’.

Emilie contributed to the IPCC 6th Assessment Report of the Working Group I published in 2021, as a Chapter Scientist and Contributing Author on the Atlas Chapter (and associated Interactive Atlas). She worked with scientists across the world to summarise in writing the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science.