Research interests
Sebastian Schemm is a member of the Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics group at DAMTP. His research interests are in the field of atmospheric sciences. In particular, the physics and dynamics of weather and climate in the extratropics across spatio-temporal scales from turbulence to synoptic- and to planetary scales. A second interest is in high resolution atmospheric modelling and some machine learning. This involves modeling at different complexity, the use of observations, basic theory and the development of diagnostic tools.
In recent years, research has focused on the life cycle of extratropical cyclones, the dynamics of the jet stream and the storm tracks, Rossby waves and teleconnection patterns. Beyond these topics, ongoing research is on parameter estimations using data assimilation in LES simulations, diabatic modification of the atmospheric circulation, data-driven parameterisations and km-scale global models.
He received an ERC Starting Grant (2020–2024), the European Meteorological Society's Young Researcher Medaille (2019), is co-editor of the EGU journal Weather and Climate Dynamics and of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. In 2025, he received the DFG Heisenberg Fellowship.
Selected publications
See ORCID for a complete list or below at the bottom of this page.
Career
At DAMTP, I am a Heisenberg Fellow, which is regarded similar to a non-permanent associated professor. Previously, I led an ERC Starting Grant-funded research group at ETH Zurich as an assistant professor and was as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de météorologie dynamique (LMD), l'École Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Paris, and the University of Bergen, Norway.
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2025 Heisenberg Fellow, DAMTP, University of Cambrige, UK.
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2020 – 2024 ERC StG-funded Assistant Professor (without tenure track), ETH Zurich.
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2019 – 2020 Researcher at ETH Zurich and Visiting Professor at University of Vienna.
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2017 – 2018 Postdoctoral researcher LMD, ENS, Paris (SNSF funded).
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2014 – 2017 Postdoctoral researcher University of Bergen, Norway.
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2010 – 2013 PhD at ETH Zurich, CH.
PhD students
DAMTP (ongoing)
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Pritthijit Nath (main supervisor Mark Webb, UK MetOffice): Incorporating reinforcement learning into subgrid-scale parametrisations.
ETH (ongoing)
- Nora Zilibotti (co-supervisor Heini Wernli): A fresh look at the jet-storm track relationship.
- Jan Zibell: On the role of midlatitude eddies in shaping the hemispheric-wide energy cycle.
- Simon Adamov (co-supervisor Oliver Fuhrer, MeteoSwiss): Machine learning-based high-resolution ensemble weather forecasting.
- Dana Grund (co-supersior Mishra Siddhartha): Estimating unknown model parameters in LES simulations using Bayesian inversion.
Selected projects (ongoing)
- EU Horizon project WeatherGenerator led by ECMWF
- Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) - High-Resolution Atmospheric Downscaling Using Generative Models (HiRAD-Gen)
Publications
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