EMS Silver Medal 2024 for Sue Grimmond

The Council of the European Meteorological Society has selected Prof. Dr Susan Grimmond, United Kingdom, as the recipient of the EMS Silver Medal 2024. This award recognizes her exceptional scientific and academic career, marked by pioneering contributions to the field of urban meteorology, her leadership in the meteorological community, and the impact of her work in operations for weather and climate modelling.

The Silver Medal ceremony, which includes a Silver Medal Lecture by the Laureate, will be held during the Annual Meeting of the EMS in Barcelona, Spain, 2 – 6 September 2024:

Silver Medal Lecture: “Urban weather and climate: contributions and challenges to achieving a climate-neutral Europe”

Sue Grimmond: “I would like to thank the EMS and those who nominated me for this wonderful and very unexpected award. I would like to recognise the many people I have worked with (students, postdocs, technicians, fellow research colleague and all the support staff) at many institutions in Europe and beyond. Our collaborations have been both stimulating and fun, I would not be receiving this without them. I also thank the EMS for recognizing urban meteorology.”

Sue Grimmond is Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Reading and a past Met Office Joint Chair.

Sue Grimmond has focused from the start of her academic career on the field of urban meteorology, which was a newly emerging field at the time and pioneered the modelling and observing the urban environment, particularly with respect to the exchange of heat, moisture and momentum between urban surfaces and the overlying atmosphere. She made original and important contributions to the science of urban meteorology at both national and global level.

Her research interests focus on Urban Climate, Land surface modelling, Micrometeorology, Hydroclimatology, Boundary Layer Meteorology and Integrated Urban Services. It is important to note that Sue Grimmond’s research did not only focus on the pure science but always aimed to serve applications, and wider communities. This is expressed through her leadership of urban model intercomparison studies and her joint professorship with the Met Office, as well as recent contributions as ECMWF implement an urban land-surface scheme into their model.

During her career, Sue Grimmond has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications. She served the European meteorological community in particular by her leading contributions to international research programmes such as ASSURE (NERC funded), AirPro (NERC), COSMO (NERC), CSSP- China (Newton Fund/Met Office), FUTURE (EPSRC), UrbanFluxes (H2020),  emBRACE (EUf7), ClearfLo (NERC), and of course the recent EU ERC Synergy grant urbisphere in collaboration with European partners.

In addition to her extraordinary scientific achievements, Prof. Dr. Sue Grimmond contributed significantly to the field of meteorology in multiple leadership positions. As an example of international contribution, she has been actively working in different expert duties of World Meteorological Organization (WMO) since 2002 enhancing the understanding of urban boundary layers and was a lead author of several WMO Guidance Documents. She is one of the establishers and active members of International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC), which is an organization that brings to together urban meteorologist and climate scientists throughout the world. She was was Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Meteorology & Climatology for 13 years and currently serves on the editorial board of the Urban Climate journal.

As a summary, Sue’s footprint on urban boundary layer studies has been very profound and she did all of this with great passion and genuine enthusiasm. As expression of her excellence in the field, she has received numerous awards, including the Sergej Zilitinkevich Memorial Award 2023, which was awarded to her during the last EMS Annual Meeting in Bratislava. Last, not least, Sue showed great leadership in the field, and mentorship to many scholars at the MSc, PhD and postdoctoral level.

About the EMS Silver Medal

The EMS Silver Medal was established in 2008 to highlight distinguished contributions to the development of meteorology in Europe. The Award is presented annually.

Candidates for the EMS Silver Medal can be nominated by EMS Member Societies and Associate Members, EMS Committees and Project Teams through their respective chairs, and EMS Council representatives. Nominations of female candidates are accepted in uneven years, nominations of male candidates in even years. The EMS Awards Committee, consisting of senior members of meteorological institutions in Europe, makes recommendations to the EMS Council for a final decision.

Previous Silver Medallists included the late Karin Labitzke (2008), David Burridge (2010), the late Jean François Geleyn (2011), Michel Jarraud (2016) , Julia Slingo (2017) and Sarah Jones (2023).
For more details please visit: https://www.emetsoc.org/awards/award-category/ems-silver-medal/