Florence Rabier
Florence Rabier is honoured with the EMS Silver Medal 2025 for her ground-breaking scientific, academic and leadership career, marked by pioneering contributions to variational data assimilation of satellite observations in NWP, and her proactive role positioning ECMWF at the forefront of the machine learning revolution.
Dr. Florence Rabier is the Director-General of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (2016-2025). Through an exceptional scientific, academic and leadership career, she made highly influential and distinguished contributions to the development of meteorology in Europe and worldwide.
Service to the European Meteorological Community
Through her excellent and committed leadership of ECMWF during very challenging times, Dr. Rabier made a profound contribution to the European meteorological community. Her strategic guidance has ensured that ECMWF delivers cutting-edge science and uses technological advances to continuously improve the quality and relevance of ECMWF predictions. She has played a key role in positioning ECMWF as a key provider of information and services for the European Union, in particular in the further development of Copernicus services and through the Destination Earth initiative.
Facilitating collaboration within the European meteorological community has a high priority for Dr. Rabier: she works closely with ECMWF member states and with the other players of the European meteorological Infrastructure (EMI), as well as fostering partnerships with research institutions, space agencies and ensuring a strong European contribution through ECMWF to WMO.
More recently, Dr. Rabier has been at the forefront of the responding to challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence for numerical weather prediction. Due to her recognition and communication of the risks and opportunities of AI, ECMWF demonstrated its ability to innovate in this field and the EMI was able to respond to these challenges in a rapid and coordinated manner .
Dr. Rabier’s contributions go well beyond those she has made as Director-General of ECMWF. She exhibited strong leadership at the beginning of her career in the major international WMO research initiative THORPEX. Indeed, her substantial contributions to the field of data assimilation have advanced significantly the community’s ability to provide predictions and warnings for Europe and worldwide.
Outstanding contribution to increase and enhance the public understanding of relevant meteorological aspects and issues
Dr. Rabier is a very skilled communicator, with the ability to communicate complex issues in an attractive and understandable manner to diverse groups of people. She has delivered keynote lectures at international conferences, contributed to media articles, and numerous examples of her personal communications to educational institutes, to newspapers, magazines, radios and television, to foster public interest in meteorology and making complex weather phenomena more relatable and accessible. She has played a crucial role in enhancing public trust and engagement with science.
Through her leadership at ECMWF, Dr. Rabier has promoted open access to meteorological data, enabling researchers, policymakers, and the public to better understand and respond to weather and climate challenges. She has emphasised the role of advanced forecasting systems in saving lives and protecting infrastructure during extreme weather events, thereby raising awareness about the value of investment in meteorological science.
Scientific contributions to meteorology and related fields
The Scientific contributions of Dr. Rabier to data assimilation are recognised internationally as pivotal in enabling us to integrate observational data into numerical weather prediction models and thus improve forecast accuracy and usefulness. She played a key role in the development and operational implementation of the four-dimensional data assimilation (4D-Var) system. ECMWF was the first centre in the world to implement 4D-Var; many other NWP centres followed in the next decade. This method significantly improved global weather forecasts. Her work enhanced the incorporation of satellite data, thus increasing the accuracy of atmospheric analyses and forecasts, as well as reanalyses going back decades such as ERA5 produced by ECMWF for the Copernicus Climate Change service. At Météo-France, Dr. Rabier worked on enhancing the use of observations and adapting advanced data assimilation techniques to high-resolution models. This improved the accuracy of forecasts, including those of extreme weather events.
Major international research programmes have benefited from the contributions of Dr. Rabier. She played a leading role in the Concordiasi project, combining radiosonde ascents in Antarctica, the deployment of long-duration stratospheric balloons, and the calibrations/validation and assimilation of satellite data. Within this and other projects she led studies that quantified the impact of the Infrared Atmosphere Sounding Interferometer (IASI) data on global NWP models, demonstrating significant improvements in forecast skill, especially in remote regions with sparse conventional observations, such as the Southern Hemisphere and polar areas.
Dr. Rabier has contributed to the research community through her extensive work on observation impact studies and adjoint-based sensitivity experiments, paving the way for the next generation of data assimilation methods. She has paid particular
attention to gender equality, promoting the work and skills of female scientists. Through her mentoring of many early career scientists, her facilitation of collaboration between operational and academic researchers and her promotion of international collaboration Dr. Rabier has ensured that her scientific knowledge and advances reach far beyond her own personal contributions.