The photos taken by the conference photographer, Igor Laskowski, have been published here.
Copyright policy: CC BY-SA 4.0 by ESSL/Igor Laskowski, 2025
ECSS2025 photos
Category Archives: News
Job Vacancy
for a researcher on modelling of severe storms
ESSL Services GmbH has a vacancy for a researcher, full-time (32 – 40 hours per week).
The researcher will be working within the Climate Research & Hazard Modelling Department with the primary task of developing methods for predicting severe weather occurrence using convection-permitting models and applying them across climate and forecasting timescales.
This task involves the combination of Additive Regression Convective Hazard Models developed at ESSL with novel datasets and their further development using machine learning techniques. Aside from this, the researcher may work in other projects that fit their expertise or areas of interest, such as radar and satellite meteorology, and teaching.
ESSL is looking for a highly motivated individual with some knowledge of severe convective storms and at least a Master’s degree in Meteorology, Physics or a related field, strong programming experience, and good English skills. Other favourable qualifications include experience with AI/ML techniques, prior work with large meteorological datasets and a track record of independent research, including peer-reviewed publications.
The ESSL team is a highly motivated and growing team that performs and supports research on severe convective storms, their prediction and their impacts globally. In addition, ESSL provides training courses to researchers and forecasters across Europe. Highlights of the ESSL include the European Severe Weather Database, the Radar & Weather Data Displayer, the ESSL Testbed, and its suite of AR-CHaMo convective hazard models. Thanks to extensive global collaborations at ESSL, the successful applicant will join a growing team that works with international research institutions and private-sector partners, seeing the real-world applicability of their research.
The salary of the successful applicant will depend on their qualifications and be broadly similar to the corresponding categories of the Austrian Science Fund (https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/funding/steps-to-your-fwf-project/further-information/personnel-costs). The employee will be based in Austria, but a large amount of teleworking can be accommodated. Employment in Austria comes with a standard health insurance and a basic pension.
The duration of the job is two years. In case of good performance and a continuing growth of ESSL in the areas of the applicant’s expertise and interest, ESSL will likely want to make the employment permanent. ESSL is interested in employing a diverse team and has a diversity and gender equality plan: https://www.essl.org/cms/essl-diversity-policy-and-gender-equality-plan
We invite interested and qualified persons to submit their CV and a cover letter to Dr Francesco Battaglioli (francesco.battaglioli@essl.org) by 31 December 2025.
ESSL Annual Report 2024 published
In 2024, a record number of 9 institutional supporting members joined ESSL, probably as an indirect consequence of the exceptional hailstorm damage that occurred in Europe in 2023. The Italian regional environmental protection agency ARPA-Emilia Romagna joined ESSL as a full member. The new memberships provided ESSL with additional financial means to help fulfil its goals of advancing scientific understanding, building human capacity, and fostering cooperation within severe storm science across Europe.
Indeed, several important efforts were started or continued in 2024, most prominently the preparations for the large field campaign Thunderstorm Intensification from Mountains to plains, or TIM, which involved a large amount of coordination and exploratory work with potentially interested parties, and the authoring of a whitepaper to scientifically underpin the motivation for the campaign. In addition, we started developing a new implementation of the European Severe Weather Database, which would become operational in the third quarter of 2025. A third major investment was in the development of a new component of the ESSL Weather Data Displayer that would show Doppler radar data from European radars. At a course in December 2024, it would be used for the first time. Furthermore, a separate legal entity ESSL Services GmbH was founded to carry out services for ESSL members and others, such as developing hazard models or providing access to ESSL’s Weather Data Displayer.
Weatherwise, 2024’s most impactful events were related to heavy rainfall. The most prominent event by a large margin was the tragedy that unfolded near Valencia in eastern Spain on 29 October, where, sadly, a total number of 219 fatalities occurred as a result of a storm system that remained quasi-stationary over the region for many hours. In addition to this event, severe autumnal floods with more than a dozen fatalities also occurred in Morocco and in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The western Balkans also were the hot spot of large hail occurrence in 2024, although the total impact of hailstorms was considerably lower than in 2023, because hailstones of exceptional size were considerably rarer. The number of requests for ESWD data by non-members stayed at approximately the same, high, level as in 2023. An overview of severe weather is given in Chapter 1. This Annual Report also gives an update on the various research projects that ESSL scientists were working on, the largest of which were CHECC, PreCAST, and the collaborative projects with ECMWF. These projects resulted in significant advancements in forecasting severe weather in the medium range, where considerable predictability of hailstorms was noted to extend to 10 days in advance. Furthermore, projections of the future hailstorm climate based on the CMIP6-generation of climate models were obtained.
The full report is available here.
Tooming Award goes to a 3-country collaboration: IT-CZ-NL
The Heino Tooming awardees 2025 are Blanka Piskala, Johanna Mayer, Thorsten Fehr, Edward Malina, Daniele Gasbarra, and Ondrej Nedelcev for their ECSS2025 contribution
Satellite Multi-Sensor Perspective on Electrified Convection: EarthCARE and MTG-LI Synergy
It is a collaborative project including Italy, Czechia, and the Netherlands.
The Tooming Award is the ESSL award with the longest tradition. It fosters the idea of pan-European collaboration in the severe storms research community.
The Heino Tooming award was instigated in 2007 in the memory of the outstanding Estonian scientist Prof. Dr. Heino Tooming (see photo to the right). Eligible is any excellent scientific presentation at the European Conference on Severe Storms (ECSS) by a group led by a European scientist and involving collaborators from at least one other European country, fostering in this way collaboration across this continent in the field of severe weather research.
Record breaking ECSS2025
- 350 participants
- 41 countries represented
- 200 posters
- 80 talks
We thank our local organizing partner, the KNMI – Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, EUMETSAT, and the European Meteorological Society for their support in making this conference possible.
Next to the record numbers, many participants have been very pleased about the outstanding scientific excellence presented at the conference by a highly dynamic and competitive research community.
Nikolai Dotzek Award to Yvette Richardson
The 𝗡𝗶𝗸𝗼𝗹𝗮𝗶 𝗗𝗼𝘁𝘇𝗲𝗸 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱, the most prestigious prize in the severe weather research community, is presented every second year in memory of ESSL’s founding father, Dr. Nikolai Dotzek, for an outstanding contribution to the science of severe storms.
This year, the Nikolai Dotzek Award went to Professor Yvette Richardson (Penn State University, US) for her outstanding contributions to understanding tornadogenesis and supercell dynamics and for her immeasurable impact on science through supervising students who have gone on to develop impressive research careers of their own.
Professor Richardson’s research encompasses the complete spectrum of severe convective storms. Her research integrates state-of-the-art numerical modeling with cutting-edge observational approaches to understand storm formation and evolution. Her modeling studies have systematically investigated how temporal and spatial variations in environmental parameters influence supercell strength, rotation, and longevity.
On the observational side, she has used mobile radars to capture the fine-scale structure of supercells, and working with Prof. Paul Markowski, pioneered pseudo-Lagrangian balloon-borne sensors that provide three-dimensional in-situ thermodynamic observations within supercells.
Her leadership in major field campaigns (e.g., VORTEX2) has fundamentally advanced understanding of the discriminators between tornadic and non-tornadic supercells, addressing one of the field’s most challenging forecasting problems. Beyond research, she co-authored the definitive textbook “Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes” (2010), now the standard reference for graduate education in this field worldwide.
For this accumulation of important achievements, it is ESSL’s pleasure to award Professor Richardson the 2025 Nikolai Dotzek Award.
MTG focus at ECSS2025
A full day of the European Conference on Severe Storms was dedicated to the new MTG satellites and related topics. EUMETSAT as a co-sponsor of the ECSS and the ESSL were happy to see the strong interest and ongoing user uptake of the novel data. A record number of ECSS participants is a clear sign of the importance of this topic.
On 21 November, a forecaster workshop on MTG is offered. 70 forecasters from all over Europe are registered for that event.
EMS Young Scientist Conference Award presented at ECSS2025
Monika Feldmann is the awardee of the EMS YSCA. The award was presented to her at the occasion of the ECSS2025 conference dinner in Utrecht, the Netherlands, by ESSL officials on behalf of the European Meteorological Society.
The European Meteorological Society (EMS) Young Scientist Conference Award
ECSS2025 Programme published
The scientific programme for the European Conference on Severe Storms was published on 8 August. Corresponding emails were sent to the contributing authors and co-authors.
The submissions promise a high-quality and diverse scientific programme. 220 posters and 82 oral presentations were selected by the Scientific Programme Committee (SPC) chaired by Dr Kelly Lombardo. In many cases, the decision was not easy. The ESSL would like to thank all members of the SPC for their important voluntary work.
In addition to the presentations, a panel discussion on the various improvements and knock-on effects for nowcasting expected from MTG is scheduled for late Tuesday afternoon during the conference week.
On Wednesday, a panel discussion will be held to assess the rich legacy of Dr Chuck Doswell who passed away earlier this year.
Due to the slight delay in finalizing the programme, the deadline for the “Early Registration” fees has been postponed to 25 August at 12 UTC. More information on the registration process can be found here.
ESWD update
The European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) will receive an update of its user interface. The relaunch is scheduled for 27 August 2025.
All active users have been informed accordingly. More information on the new capabilities we will publish with the next ESSL Newsletter due end of September.