Prof Christian Jakob

Biography

Professor Christian Jakob was awarded his PhD in Meteorology from the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, in 2001. As a research and senior research scientist for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts from 1993 to 2001, he worked on the development and evaluation of the model representation of clouds, convection and precipitation. From 2002 to 2007 he was senior and principal research scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology and since 2007 he has been a professor at Monash University. Currently he is the Chair of climate modelling at Monash’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment. He is also the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century. Prof Jakob’s interests are in the development and evaluation of the processes crucial to the energy and water cycles in global atmospheric models. He is also interested in better understanding how our weather is going to change as the planet warms. Internationally, he has been engaged in many collaborative scientific activities. He is a past Co-chair of the World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP) Digital Earths Lighthouse Activity and the WCRP Modelling Advisory Council (2012-2017). He led the Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (2008-2012) and was chair of the WCRP’s Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Modelling and Prediction Panel from 2007 to 2010. In recognition of his prominent position in the climate science field, Prof Jakob was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report, Working Group 1. In 2016 his research was recognised via the Ascent Award of the American Geophysical Union’s Atmospheric Sciences Section, and in 2017 he was elected a fellow of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS). He was awarded the AMOS Morton Medal in 2018.