The panel will be moderated by the EMS President, Liz Bentley.
The panellists will be:
▪ Ko Barrett, Deputy Secretary-General of WMO, who also leads the Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative at the WMO Secretariat
▪ Florence Rabier, Director-General of ECMWF
▪ Kirstine Dale, Chief AI-Officer Met Office
▪ Gabriela Aznar, AI development team for operational applications at MeteoSwiss
▪ Alan Hally, Met Eireann Scientific Lead AI Transformation Team

A substantial part of the national gross product in many countries is weather dependent. National weather services and the private sector have been innovative for more than a century to make better use of our meteorological knowledge. However, large gains are still to be made and this prize encourages individuals and groups to come with ideas how meteorology in a practical way can further move society forward. Meteorology can make society safer, can deliver costs savings and can bring more welfare to large groups of people. More information about the Prize and the Foundation can be found at http://www.harry-otten-prize.org

Submissions of ideas for the 2025 prize round started on 15 September 2024 and closed on 10 March 2025.

Finalists will be invited to present their idea during this EMS2025 special session. This session will be held on Monday 8 September 2025 from 9:00am to 10:30am (CEST).
Based on the written submitted idea and the presentation by the participant on 8 September, the jury will decide the winner of the Harry Otten Prize and the prize will be awarded in the Awards Session at EMS2025, also on Monday 8 September.

A relaxed occasion for meeting with fellow Early Career Scientists and for chatting about future career possibilities with people who have chosen different career paths working in the private and public sector.

Join us for the first ever Speed Dating/Networking for Early Career Scientists!
This fun and fast-paced session will help you make connections and learn from experienced professionals in meteorology, climate, and related fields. Whether you’re interested in job opportunities, possible career paths or seeking advice about professional growth this event is an excellent opportunity to expand both your knowledge base and your network of contacts.

The format is simple: each table will have one professional “mentor”, while "mentorees" will change tables every 20 minutes to meet different mentors. The time allows for plenty of opportunities to ask questions, and the rotation format allows to make many connections.

At the conclusive Apéro, after the structured Speed Networking session, you can continue conversations and meet even more professionals and Early Career Scientists!

We look forward to "mentors" and "mentorees" joining us from across the atmospheric and climate science field for an engaging afternoon of networking.

Each morning during the break, forecasters from the National Meteorological Service (Slovenian Environment Agency) will present the current weather situation and forecast. They will also highlight local climate and weather features and provide commentary on the latest weather developments across Europe.

The keynote on Data-driven weather models: A new era in meteorology will be given by Mariana Clare and the ECMWF Colleagues.

Mariana Clare is a researcher at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), where she helps develop AIFS, ECMWF’s data-driven weather forecasting model. She is particularly interested in how to capture the model uncertainty in these data-driven approaches and in evaluating their physical realism. She recently received a PhD from Imperial College London, focussing on developing advanced numerical and statistical techniques to quantify uncertainty in coastal ocean models. By training she is a mathematician, having done her undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

The keynote presentation on Flood warnings everywhere - data-driven rainfall-runoff modeling at global scale will be given by Frederik Kratzert from Google Research.

Frederik is a research scientist in the Flood Forecasting team at Google. His academic background is in civil (BSc) and environmental (MSc) engineering, as well as machine learning (PhD). Besides his work and research on the intersection of hydrology and machine learning that mostly focusses on improving reliable and actionable flood forecasts, Frederik also cares deeply about open source software and open data. He is the creator of NeuralHydrology, an open source Python library for training deep learning models in the context of hydrology, and also the creator of Caravan, a global community dataset for large-sample hydrology.