Rate My Professor Ralf Toumi

Professor Ralf Toumi is Professor of Atmospheric Physics in the Department of Physics within the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London. He serves as Director of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment. Toumi was awarded his PhD from the University of Cambridge, followed by a temporary lecturing position in the Chemistry Department there. In 1994, he joined the Physics Department at Imperial College London as a Lecturer, advancing to his current professorial position. His career has focused on atmospheric and climate physics, leading the largest tropical cyclone research team in Europe.

Toumi's research specializations encompass the physics of tropical cyclones, including genesis, evolution, intensity decay, rain rates, re-intensification, and migration toward coasts, as well as their risks under climate change, insurance implications, and physical risk assessment. He leads the development of the Imperial College Storm Model (IRIS), a physics-informed global stochastic model that generates synthetic datasets from 42 years of observations for seasonal predictions and climate impact simulations, powered by millions of smartphone computations via the DreamLab app. Key publications include 'The Imperial College Storm Model (IRIS) Dataset' (2024, Scientific Data, with Nathan Sparks), 'Recent migration of tropical cyclones toward coasts' (2021, Science, with Shuai Wang), 'Does vertical wind shear increase tropical cyclone rain?' (2026, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, with K.H. Lau), 'Global increase in rain rate of tropical cyclones prior to landfall' (recent), and 'Attributing causes of increased intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes using a stochastic model (IRIS)' (2026, Environmental Research Communications, with Min Li). With 238 research works and nearly 8,000 citations, his contributions influence cyclone forecasting, disaster cost attribution—such as linking climate change to almost half the costs of hurricanes like Milton—and policy translation. Toumi received one of the first NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowships and engages in public discussions on cyclone modeling and business climate risks.