Dr Peter Bauer, Deputy Director of the Research Department of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK, has been awarded the Helmholtz International Fellow Award 2018 for his widely recognized contributions to various fields in the Earth system sciences including satellite remote sensing in weather and climate prediction, the assimilation of observations in numerical models, climate monitoring, weather and climate model development and, more recently, the preparation of models and forecasting systems for extreme-scale computing that is crucial for achieving a much-needed step change in predictive skill.
Dr Bauer has remote sensing expertise that made him one of the leading scientists in the field recognized by membership in NASA satellite mission teams for TRMM and GPM, the French Megha-Tropiques, and in highest-level advisory boards for ESA and EUMETSAT. As the head of the Satellite Section at ECMWF he has pioneered the assimilation of cloud and rainfall data in numerical weather prediction, and further established ECMWF as the world leader in satellite data usage.
His expertise has been sought by various national meteorological services (DWD, KNMI) and climate prediction centres (CMCC) through advisory board nominations and as a member in WMO’s World Weather Research Program’s top-level scientific steering committee. In 2013, Dr Bauer founded the ECMWF Scalability Programme that develops new methodologies at the interface between applied and computational science to allow running highly complex forecasting systems on future supercomputers. This programme is managed across ECMWF and its 34 Member and Cooperating States, and receives worldwide attention due to its novel approach to Earth-system science computing. In Europe, Dr Bauer is fostering the establishment of weather and climate prediction as the key application for the assessment of high-performance computing infrastructure performance. This has been recognized by the European Commission through the funding of currently seven projects with either ECMWF leadership or partnership. Dr Bauer is also coordinating a FET Flagship preparatory project proposing ExtremeEarth, a 10-year effort with a budget of 1 billion Euro which will revolutionize Europe's capability to predict and monitor environmental extremes and their impacts on society enabled by the imaginative integration of edge and exa-scale computing and the real-time exploitation of vast amount of environmental data.
“The appointment of Dr Bauer as a Helmholtz International Fellow will be of high strategic relevance for the Helmholtz Association” says Dr Thomas Jung, ESM project coordinator, who nominated Dr Bauer for the award. “As a Helmholtz International Fellow, Dr Bauer commits to strengthening his collaboration with the research centres of the Helmholtz Association participating in the ESM project.”
As part of his commitment, Dr Bauer will visit the AWI and other centres (e.g. Forschungszentrum Jülich, Helmholtz Zentrum für Umweltforschung Leipzig und Geofoschungszentrum Potsdam) to discuss and collaborate on issues related to the ExtremeEarth project with the Earth system modelling community. He will also act as an advisor to the steering group of the ESM project.
“I am deeply honoured with this award” said Dr Bauer “and I am looking forward to strengthening ECMWF’s collaboration with the Helmholtz Association and ESM project partners in particular to advance our ability to simulate and predict weather, climate and the Earth system, and to ensure that we can realize our ambitious science agenda on future super-computers”.
Dr Bauer will present the ExtremeEarth project at the ESM project annual meeting (13-14 September in Leipzig) and also teach at the ESM Summer School 2019 (9-19 Sept 2019 in Bad Aibling).