Secretariat

The EUMETNET Executive Director, Dr. Klemen Bergant, and the Programmes and Projects Coordinator, Claudia Keller, visited the Headquarters of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, Switzerland on 25 and 26 November 2024 to talk about ongoing and possible future collaboration between the two organisations. They were joined on the first day by Christophe Jacob, the EUMETRep Programme Manager from the joint WMO, EUMETNET, ECMWF and EUMETSAT EU liaison office based in Brussels.

During this visit, they had the opportunity to meet with the Secretary General of WMO, Prof. Celeste Saulo, and some of her colleagues. Among other things, they discussed EUMETNET’s support to the United Nation’s Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative, and possible opportunities to strengthen collaboration in the areas of marine observations, RBON, Regional WIGOS Centres, Artificial Intelligence, and data sharing.

The two very productive days were organised by the WMO’s Office for Europe (RA VI) and its Director Dr. Kornélia Radics. We thank everyone for the inspiring meetings and are looking forward to our continued collaboration.

EUMETNET would like to welcome Klemen Bergant, who has taken over from Eric Petermann as the new Executive Director from 1^st September.

“It is a great honour and responsibility for me to take up the post of Executive Director of EUMETNET and thus support members in developing their individual and joint capabilities in the fields of observation, forecasting, climate and aviation.”

Before taking up this new role, Klemen Bergant was at the Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO) where he was the Director of the Meteorological Office from 2006 to 2017 and then Director of the Meteorology and Hydrology Office from 2017 to 2020.

During his time at ARSO, he was a permanent representative of Slovenia with the WMO (World Meteorological Organisation) and the Slovenian delegate at EUMETSAT (www.eumetsat.int) and ECMWF (www.ecmwf.int) Councils.

He also represented ARSO at the EUMETNET and ECOMET (www.ecomet.eu) Assemblies as well as in the ALADIN consortium for limited-area modelling and its Central European subgroup RC-LACE. He was EUMETNET Assembly’s Vice-Chair (2009 – 2013) and Chair (2013 – 2015), Chair of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee (2013 – 2015), and Chair of the EUMETNET’s Governance Task Team (2009 – 2010) that proposed the current structure of EUMETNET.

“Through the cooperation of national meteorological services with atmospheric and ocean observations in remote areas, efficient exchange and dissemination of data, coordination of forecasting and warnings, EUMETNET also helps its members to address the challenges of extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change.“ K. Bergant

Before joining the Slovenian Environment Agency, he was Head of the Centre for Atmospheric Research at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia, where he is still Adjunct Professor of Meteorology.