Prof. Dr. Christof Appenzeller

Christof Appenzeller is Director General of the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss and has been Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich since 2012, where he was a senior lecturer since 2004. His research interests include the analysis and prediction of the weather and climate system with a focus on annual climate variability, climate change and weather and climate risk management. He has led a variety of research projects, has initiated and served on several steering committees, including the National Centre for Competence in Research Climate (NCCR-Climate), the National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS), the Centre for Climate System Modelling at ETH Zurich and the EXCLAIM initiative on extreme scale computing and data platform for cloud-resolving weather and climate modeling. He has also been involved in committees working at the interface between science and policy (e.g. in the Forum for Climate and Global Change ProClim).

From 1999, Christof Appenzeller held various positions at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, including Head of the Climate Division and Head of the Analysis and Forecasting Department. As of 1 January 2023, Christof Appenzeller has been appointed Director of MeteoSwiss, with ~380 employees in Zurich, Geneva, Payerne and Locarno. MeteoSwiss is part of Switzerland's critical infrastructure and provides a wide range of weather and climate-related services to the public, authorities, security organisations, aviation and the private sector, as well as to the scientific community and the international community. In his current role, Christof Appenzeller is Switzerland's Permanent Representative to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a member of the WMO Executive Council, and Head of the Swiss Delegation to the Councils of EUMETSAT, ECMWF and EUMETNET.

After his studies in environmental physics at the Department of Natural Sciences of the ETH Zurich, Christof Appenzeller completed his doctoral thesis in atmospheric dynamics at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the ETH Zurich. He was a research associate in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA  and in the Department of Climate and Environmental Physics at the University of Bern.

Christof Appenzeller is the author of numerous scientific publications in various journals, including Science and Nature.