Meet the Team

Júnior Gonçalves

Júnior Gonçalves is the partner lead from INAM – National Institute of Meteorology, Mozambique

Felix Imbwae

Felix Imbwae is the Principal Meteorologist at the Zambia Meteorological Department. He is a seasoned Meteorologist with expertise in climate variability and change, Weather Forecasting and Research .

Douglas Parker

Project PI

Professor Doug Parker is a Meteorologist with interests in the prediction of high-impact weather in our changing climate. Doug has led, and participated in, some large projects and field campaigns in the UK, Africa and India. He uses a range of research tools to solve practical problems, including field measurements, satellite remote sensing, computer models and mathematical theory.
He is particularly interested in weather forecasting, both scientifically and as an operational challenge. After being part-funded by the UK Met Office for 9 years, he has collaborated closely with national weather services in Africa, notably Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. Weather prediction is a transdisciplinary challenge which requires us to understand social and economic factors in addition to the mathematics, physics and data science needed to make a prediction.

Estelle De Coning

Dr Estelle de Coning is the Head of the World Weather Research Programme at WMO. She leads the current and new activities of the WWRP, linked to the WMO Strategic Plan and Long-Term Goal 3, which aims to advance targeted research on time scales of minutes to months. She is originally from South Africa, where she worked for the South African Weather Service until 2016, as Chief Scientist: Nowcasting and Very Short-Range Forecasting. This research group focused on lightning, radar and satellite applications for nowcasting purposes.
Her PhD focused on “Applications of meteorological satellite products for short-term forecasting of convection in southern Africa”. The EUMETSAT Nowcasting Satellite Application Facility’s software was installed at the South African Weather Service under her leadership and is operationally available for southern Africa via the South African Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre website. She is the author and co-author of several national and international peer-reviewed papers, chapters in books as well as WMO publications, such as WWRP’s “Seamless Prediction of the Earth System: from Minutes to Months” (2015) and “Guidelines for Nowcasting Techniques” (2017) and “Guidelines for satellite-based nowcasting in Africa” (2023).

Katharine Vincent

Work Package 1 Lead

Dr Katharine Vincent graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Geography from the University of Oxford, gained a distinction for her Masters in Environmental Science Research at the University of East Anglia, and was awarded her PhD (looking at gendered vulnerability to climate change in South Africa) from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in 2007. She is currently a visiting Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (School of Architecture and Planning), a Visiting Researcher at the University of Leeds (School of Earth and Environment), and an Associate of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy.
Katharine’s general interest is in the human dimensions of global environmental change and social development. She has worked and consulted for a variety of organisations, including NGOs, government, inter-governmental organisations and the private sector. On graduating she designed research and conservation projects in marine and terrestrial national parks in Indonesia, then worked for the UN Environment Programme in Geneva on sustainable business with retail and service sector partners across Europe, and then for the-then Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London.

Nico Kroese

WP2 Co-Lead

Nico Kroese has worked at the South African Weather Service since 1984.

Adriaan Perrels

Professor Adriaan Perrels is an international expert in environmental and spatial economics, with special reference to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Next to his academic research performance, he has led and contributed to many projects in support of public decision making and the ex-post evaluation of policies, in Finland, the Netherlands, and internationally for the EU, the Nordic Council, and the World Bank. Prior to positions in the Finnish Meteorological Institute (since 2009) and the VATT institute for economic research (1999-2010), he worked in the Netherlands in TNO Institute for Infrastructure and Spatial Planning, and the Dutch Energy Research Centre ECN.
He has expertise in the Cost-benefit analysis of weather and climate services, including the evaluation of climate change impacts and evaluation of adaptation strategies and measures. His other specialities include socio-economic scenario development, weather and climate in transport and urban planning and climate change

Christopher Taylor

Dr Christopher Taylor is primarily interested in how properties of the land surface, such as soil moisture and vegetation cover, influence weather and climate. Whilst trained as a modeller, I have increasingly focused on using observations to identify how fluxes of moisture and sensible heat from the land affect the lower atmosphere and convective rainfall. Much of my work has been motivated by the need to better understand the climate of semi-arid regions

John Marsham

Dr John Marsham is Met Office Joint Chair at the University of Leeds leading the Leeds component of the Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP). He is a member of Water@Leeds and leads a research group studying atmospheric convection, tropical meteorology, climate change and Saharan dust uplift. His focus is on taking process studies through to implications for and improvements in weather and climate models.

Nomie Mbuli

Project Manager

Previously at the South African Red Cross Society, Nomie has 15 years experience in Humanitarian services and Disaster management

Denise Groves

Project Co-ordinator

After working on the SWIFT project as Project Administrator and alongside project managing the FASTA project, Denise is now co-ordinating the WISER-EWSA project. Passionate about bringing reliable forecasting to everyone across Africa.