Barbara brings strong expertise in forecast verification into the PCAPS project. Building on the experience she gained as lead of the verification Task Team in the WMO’s Polar Prediction Project (PPP), and from her role as co-chair of the WWRP Joint working Group in Forecast Verification Research (JWGFVR), she aims to enhance and improve verification practices in polar regions.

Barbara holds a BSc in pure math at the University of Studies of Milan, Italy, an MSc in applied math at the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Meteorology at Reading University, UK, during which she developed a novel wavelet-based intensity-scale verification approach. She has been working on forecast verification research at the Meteorological Research Division of Environment and Climate Change Canada in her post-doc (2004-2007), and has been working as Research Scientist within the same institution since 2014. She has also worked in climate science (2007-2013), at the Ouranos Consortium on Regional Climatology and Adaptation to Climate Change (Montreal, Canada), focussing on analysis and downscaling of extreme events leveraging on Extreme Value Theory.

Barbara is a statistician/mathematician and physical scientist with major research focus on forecast verification methods, and in particular on process diagnostics and spatial verification approaches. Her research interests (and love for the great outdoors) drives her research focus to the polar environment, where verification poses still unresolved challenges that she aims to addressed within PCAPS.

Research interests:
ESM verification | spatial verification approaches | process diagnostics