Bio

Luca Delle Monache is the Deputy Director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. His goal is to provide support for the Director, Marty Ralph, in managing activities within the Center, and in developing new science and application directions to support CW3E’s Vision and Mission. Specifically, Dr. Delle Monache oversees the Center’s atmospheric river science, field research, supercomputing, modeling, data assimilation, postprocessing and artificial intelligence, subseasonal-to-seasonal predictions, and hydrology, with the goal of maintaining state-of-the-art models and tools while actively exploring innovative algorithms and approaches. In close coordination with the Center Director and the management team, he develops new scientific and programmatic strategies to maintain and further expand CW3E leadership on understanding, observing, and predicting extreme events in Western North America.

He earned a Laurea (~M.S.) in Mathematics from the University of Rome, Italy (1997), an M.S. in Meteorology from the San Jose State University, U.S. (2002), and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of British Columbia, Canada (2005). His interests include the design of ensemble methods, probabilistic prediction and uncertainty quantification, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, inverse modeling, postprocessing methods including machine learning algorithms, extreme events associated with atmospheric rivers, renewable energy, air quality and transport and dispersion modeling. Among his main scientific accomplishments, there is the development during his Ph.D. of the first ensemble for air quality prediction, and later in his career the design of the analog ensemble which has been applied successfully in several of the fields, and is based on a new paradigm for ensemble design. Luca Delle Monache has been the principal investigator of several multi-institution multi-million projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the private sector. Before joining CW3E, he was a postdoc and then a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California (2006-2009), and a project scientist and then the Science Deputy Director of the National Security Applications Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado (2009-2018).