Team
Ad de Roo is Action Leader of the Weather Driven Natural Hazards activity on floods.
He is a senior scientist with a PhD in Physical Geography on the topic of hydrological and soil erosion modelling.

Both his MSc and PhD were completed at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where he also has worked as lecturer and researcher until 1997, before coming to JRC.
He developed the physically-based catchment models LISEM for soil erosion and LISFLOOD for flood simulation and has a 15 year professional experience with hydrological simulation models linked to a GIS.
Many publications have appeared in international journals such as Hydrological Processes, Journal of Hydrology, CATENA, Geomorphology, European Journal of Soil Science, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth and Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, and in several books.

His main expertise is in hydrology, hydrological modelling, GIS, soil physics and soil erosion.

Floods Group

Thielen Jutta Jutta Thielen-del Pozo is currently leading the task of coordination and development of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) in the FLOODS action. She joined the Joint Research Centre in 2000 and has since been working on methods of incorporating state-of-the-art of meteorological weather forecasts into flood predictions on European scale as well as on smaller scales for flashflood prone river basins.

She is a senior scientist working in the field of hydro-meteorology. She studied meteorology at the University of Karlsruhe (MSc in 1989) in Germany and completed her studies in Environmental Science at the University of Lancaster, in the UK, with a Ph.D. on the influence of hilly terrain on the outbreak of severe storms (1994). Since then she has developed her professional career in the field of high-resolution numerical modelling of severe weather including rain, hail, and windstorms, and on the interfacing of meteorological models with hydrological models.

Her work is documented in publications in both meteorological and hydrological international journals and books. She is co-editor of Atmospheric Science Letters, a journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, for which she also received the ASL award for 2008. Together with J. Schaake from NOAA, she is further co-chairing the Hydrological Ensemble Prediction Experiment initiative (HEPEX).
Alfieri Lorenzo Lorenzo Alfieri graduated as a Civil Engineering in 2004 at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, with a thesis in collaboration with the ETH of Zurich (Switzerland).
In 2008 he got his PhD in Hydraulic Engineering at the same university and then started a collaboration as a grantholder with ITHACA, a partner of the United Nations WFP.
Then, after one year working in a construction firm, he joined the Floods Action of the JRC-IES in July 2009 as post doctoral researcher.

His expertise is mostly in the field of hydrometeorology and flood hydrology. Some of his research work has been focused on radar rainfall estimation, design rainfalls and land-atmosphere interactions and it is published in international peer-reviewed journals. His current research activity is mainly focused on flash-flood mitigation and on the testing and assessment of an EFAS-like system for flash-flood prone catchments (IMPRINTS competitive project).
Berny Bisselink Berny Bisselink graduated as a MSc. in Meteorology in 2004 at the Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He started his PhD in 2005 in the department of Hydrology and Geo-environmental Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The main objective of his PhD study was to assess the effect and understand the underlying mechanisms which involve the land-surface and the overlying atmosphere with respect to processes of extreme events (both wet and dry conditions) and future climate.

He joined the Weather-Driven Natural Hazards activity of the IES in Februari 2011. The overall purpose is to implement applied research on floods and water quantity modeling in Africa and Europe using state of the art satellite rainfall and soil moisture products.
Bogner Konrad Konrad Bogner after finishing his studies on torrent and avalanche control at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, he was working at the Institute of Water Management, Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering (Prof. Nachtnebel) for six years as research associate. The main objectives of his work included rainfall-runoff modelling at various temporal and spatial scales, statistical analysis (e.g. extreme value estimation) and stochastic rainfall modelling (topic of his PhD thesis).

At next he moved to Switzerland to work for one year at the EPFL (Prof. Musy) on climate change modelling, and a half year at the EAWAG (Prof. Reichert) in order to apply the soil water assessment toolbox at the Thur catchment. After that he has been research associate at the Bavarian Water Resources Agency for 3 years, where he was working on deterministic flood forecasting (coupling weather forecasts and rainfall runoff models), reservoir simulation and optimization.

In the beginning of the year 2006 he moved to Ispra, where he started to work at the Joint Research Center carrying out scientific research in the field of medium range probabilistic flood forecasting within the framework of the Integrated Project PREVIEW.
Burek Peter Peter Burek graduated as a MSc in Applied Physical Geography with focus on geology and hydrology in 1997 at the University of Trier (Germany).  After finishing his studies, he worked at the Institute of Water Resources Management, Hydraulic and Rural Engineering, University of
Karlsruhe (Germany) for six years as research associate. The objectives of his work were mainly concentrated on the Elbe catchment and included statistical analyses and runoff modeling. He received a PhD in engineering science on the assessment of longterm groundwater dynamics.

In 2003 he moved to the Federal Institute of Hydrology in order to build up the waterlevel forecasting system WAVOS for the Elbe River, which is also used at the flood forecasting centres in Saxony and  Saxony-Anhalt. Furthermore he worked on deterministic water level forecasting and on effects of climate change on floods in the Elbe River (VERIS-Elbe).

He joined the Land Management and Natural Hazards Unit of the IES in May 2009, where his main tasks are the maintenance and further development of the LISFLOOD hydrological model as well as the European Flood Alert System (EFAS).
Feyen Luc Luc Feyen graduated as an Environmental Engineer in 1997 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). In 2002 he received a Ph.D. in hydrology at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium) in collaboration with Lancaster University (UK) and the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). After his Ph.D. he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences of Stanford University (US). He joined the Land Management Unit of the IES in January 2005.

He has experience in hydrology, hydrogeology, integrated catchment modelling, climate change impact assessment, extreme value analysis, data assimilation, stochastic optimisation, risk and reliability analysis, uncertainty estimation, Bayesian statistics and decision analysis, and geostatistics.

Currently, his research focuses on the assessment of changes (and their impact) in the hydrological cycle induced by global warming, land use dynamics and socio-economic developments.
Lorini Valerio Valerio Lorini graduated in Electronic Engineering in 2002 at Universita' Degli Studi di Brescia (Italy). He graduated with a Thesis on Artiificial Intelligence in the framework of Planning Systems where he obtained a scholarship for the AIPS 2002 workshop from ESA (European Space Agency).

He has experience in ICT Development and System Administration and has worked as DBA and SysAdmin since 2002. Among the several positions covered he worked as DBA Analyst/Senior Developer for ERP software houses in Europe, he's been the IT manager at the EPLO (European Public Law Organization) in Athens and has worked as IT/DBA Administrator in the framework of the "Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery" project run by Emergency (Italian NGO) in Khartoum(Sudan).

He joined the Floods Action in the Land Management and Natural Hazards Unit of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability in July 2010. His main tasks are the management of the Biztalk/SQL Server System for the EU-FLOOD GIS system, a system collecting and storing real time and historical meteorological and hydrological data and checking the quality of the loaded data.
Muraro Davide

Davide Muraro is experienced in web technologies development, programming and database's analyst.

His tasks include:
Web sites and software development
Writing programs in the different programming languages
Preparation of scripts for application installation
Optimization of procedures
Database performance analyst
Preparation and execution of test programs
Preparation of diagrams

Programming skills: PHP, ASP, ColdFusion/MX, PL/SQL, bash-script, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, XML, XSL, XSL-Fo, Delphi, Visual Basic, C, Java, MapServer and PHP MapScript
DBMSs Knowledge:
SQL SERVER, oracle, MySql, PostgreSQL, Access, SQLite

He joined the Land Management Unit of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (Floods and other Weather Driven Natural Hazards Action) in october 2005, where he provides informatics development and operational support.
Rojas Rodrigo Rodrigo Rojas graduated as a Civil Engineer (Geography) in 1999 at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACh). After working five years as project engineer for the National Water Office of Chile, in 2003 he joined the two-year IUPWARE programme and in 2005 he received an MSc in Water Resources Engineering at the Free University of Brussels (VUB, Belgium). In 2005 he joined the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the Catholic University Leuven (K.U.Leuven, Belgium), where he received a PhD in Hydrogeology/Groundwater Modelling in 2009.

During his professional and research career he has gained experience in water quality modelling, hydro(geo)logical modelling, integrated water resources management, strategic allocation of water permits, inverse modelling, uncertainty and sensitivity analyses, extreme value analysis, ensemble modelling, geostatistics and Bayesian statistics. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Water Resources Research, Journal of Hydrology, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Hydrological Processes and Hydrogeology Journal.

He joined the Floods action in the Land Management and Natural Hazards Unit of the IES in August 2009 as a postdoctoral researcher to work in the assessment of climate change impacts on the hydrological cycle in Europe.
Salomon Peter Peter Salamon graduated as an M. Sc. in Applied Environmental Geoscience in 2001 at the Eberhard-Karls Universität in Tübingen (Germany). After working two years for an international environmental consulting company (AMEC Earth & Environmental) in Frankfurt (Germany) as a Project Manager, he started in 2003 his doctorate studies at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), where he received a Ph.D. in Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering in 2006.

During his research activities and professional career he has gained experience in hydrogeology, numerical modeling of subsurface flow and transport processes, geostatistics, aquifer remediation design, uncertainty analysis, environmental risk assessments and hydrological modeling.

He joined the Land Management Unit of the IES in october 2006 where his main working tasks are the support and development of the European Flood Alert System, flood risk mapping and the development of data assimilation techniques for operational flood forecasting.

His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Water Resources Research and Journal of Contaminant Hydrology.
Sint Hadewij Mirabella Hadewij Sint is a GIS specialist who is now working on the EU-FLOOD project for the floods section.

She started work as a hydrographic surveyor for Boskalis, one of the worlds largest dredging companies, in 1993 after completing a BSc in Hydrographic Surveying at the Nautical Academy in Amsterdam.

She switched over from dredging to the seismic industry in 1997, and after two years as a seismic navigator and navigational dataprocessor she became a freelance surveyor working back in the dredging industry. In 2001 she decided that she had enough of the offshore life and switched to GIS, which was closely related to the work she did as a surveyor.

After she finished her MSc at the University of Edinburgh in 2002 she worked for 3 years as the Senior GIS Officer for South Gloucestershire council. There she was working with a team of GIS technicians and leading GIS projects and investigating and implementing new technologies. Under her guidance the council won the NLPG exemplar award in 2005. In 2005 Hadewij left the council and followed her partner to live in Thailand for 2 years. There she found a job in IT leading a team of web-developers and designing back-office applications interfacing remote systems using web-services and other technologies.

In February 2008 she started with the JRC as the EU-FLOOD specialist, coordinating the implementation of the EU-FLOOD GIS system, a system collecting and storing real time and historical meteorological and hydrological data and checking the quality of the loaded data.
Thiemig Vera Vera Thiemig graduated as a M.Sc. in Transnational Ecosystem-based Water Management in 2009 at the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands) / University Duisburg-Essen (Germany). During her academic studies she has been working at the Institute of Hydrology, Water Resources Management and Environmental Engineering (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany), gaining experiences in hydrological modeling and GIS.

In February 2009 she joined the Land Management and Natural Hazards Unit as a trainee. Her work is focused on a feasibility study that investigates the applicability of the EFAS-methodologies on African Basins.
Thirel Guillaume Guillaume Thirel graduated as an M. Sc. in Mathematical Engineering in 2006 at Bordeaux University (France). He obtained an engineering diploma in the field of mathematical and mechanical modelling in the MATMECA engineering school (Bordeaux, France) in 2006.

He started in 2006 his doctorate studies in the CNRM/GAME, the research laboratory of the French meteorological services (Météo-France) and of the CNRS (Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques). He received in 2009 a Ph. D. in hydrometeorology, on the topic of ensemble streamflow predictions at a short- and medium-range. He also developed a past discharges assimilation system for improving the probabilistic discharge forecasts.

He joined the FLOODS Action in the Land Management and Natural Hazard Unit of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability in December 2009. His current task is to develop data assimilation techniques for taking advantage of the potential of snow cover fraction satellite data in the LISFLOOD model for the European Flood Alert System.

Spatial Planning Group

Lavalle Carlo Carlo Lavalle after graduating in Physics for the University of Bologna, and achieving the specialisation in applied Geophysics, spent the initial part of his professional career as researcher in the Italian CNR in the fields of Atmospheric Dynamics and environmental impact of global changes. He worked for the European Space Agency and in 1990 he joined the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

He is with the Land Management Unit of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, head of the Urban and Regional Development sector.

Currently, he is working in the following areas of applications: urban and regional planning, environmental impact of human activities and of extreme weather events at local scale, environmental protection and impact assessment of regional development programmes.
Bianchi Alessandra Alessandra Bianchi has always had a keen interest in environmental issues and after high school and some working experience, decided to attend the Faculty of Environmental Sciences at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo and completed her degree in September 2004.

During the studies, she became interested in GIS technology. After working in the GIS field, she gained professional qualifications as "Geoprocessing technician" and as "Global Positioning System technician". She then attended the master in “Territorial Information Systems & Remote Sensing” at the University of Venice IUAV.

After working some years as GIS technician applied to land and environmental management for a number of Italian private companies, she joined the Floods action in August 2010 as a GIS analyst to work in the assessment of climate change impacts on the hydrological cycle in Europe.
Mccormick Niall Niall McCormick graduated from University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland, with the degrees of Bachelor of Agricultural Science (Forestry) in 1986, and Master of Agricultural Science (Remote Sensing and GIS) in 1989.

Since December 1999 he has been a Scientific officer at the Land Management Unit of the JRC's Institute for Environment and Sustainability. Previously he worked as: a research scientist in remote sensing and GIS at the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) in Helsinki, Finland (1999), and at the JRC's Space Applications Institute, Ispra, Italy (1993-1998); a computer programmer at a GIS and image processing software company (ERDAS) in Atlanta, USA (1991-1992); a research and teaching assistant at UCD, Ireland (1986-1991). From 2000 to 2005 he was Editor of the EARSeL Newsletter, the international scientific quarterly publication of the European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories.

One of his main areas of expertise is the development of software (in Standard C) for the spatial analysis of GIS environmental datasets. He has developed software packages for several applications, including satellite-based forest classification and mapping (http://inforest.jrc.it/activities/silvics), automatic preprocessing and terrain correction of microwave (ERS-SAR) satellite imagery, and fragmentation analysis of urban and natural landscapes.

Within the Weather-Driven Natural Hazards activity he is working on the development and application of methods for assessing and modeling of urban and regional land use development processes and their environmental impacts.

 

 
Last Updated on Thursday, 01 December 2011 13:52