Rate My Professor Gregor Leckebusch

Professor Gregor C. Leckebusch is Professor of Meteorology and Climatology in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, holding the UK Met Office Joint Chair since October 2022. He obtained his Dipl.-Met. and PhD in Meteorology from the University of Cologne, Germany, with his doctoral thesis on meteorological diagnostics of polar ice cores by means of paleoclimate model simulations. After his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on regional extreme event modelling and impact assessment. From 2004 to 2010, he served as Associate Professor at the Institute for Meteorology, Freie Universität Berlin, where he completed his Habilitation in 2009. He then acted as Chair of Dynamical Meteorology at the University of Leipzig during 2010-2011 before joining the University of Birmingham in 2011. Promoted to full Professor in 2019, he directed the NERC Doctoral Training Partnership CENTA from 2019 to 2022.

Leckebusch specializes in natural science research on meteorological and climatological extreme events and related impacts, focusing on extra-tropical wind storms, tropical and extra-tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation events, compound events, their predictability across time scales, and changes under anthropogenic climate change. He has published about 70 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, with his work cited over 6,000 times (Google Scholar) and an h-index of 34. Key publications include 'On the relationship between cyclones and extreme windstorm events over Europe under climate change' (2004), 'Development and application of an objective storm severity measure for the Northeast Atlantic region' (2008), 'Mei-yu Front Assessment in CMIP6 Earth System Models During the East Asian Summer Monsoon' (2025), and 'Improvement of decadal predictions of monthly extreme Mei-yu rainfall via a causality guided approach' (2024). As principal or co-investigator, he has secured over £13 million in funding across more than 30 grants, collaborating with industry on climate risk assessments and parametric insurance. He serves on the editorial board of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, has convened an EGU session on mid-latitude cyclones since 2009, contributed to IPCC assessments, and held a Marie Curie Fellowship from 2012 to 2016.