Affiliation: Mediterranean Center for Environmental Studies (CEAM)

Fields or areas of research Meteorology and climatology of the Mediterranean region in the context of climate change, extreme meteorological phenomena, soil-vegetation-atmosphere feedbacks, high-resolutions regionalized numerical modeling on time scales from days to decades, assimilation of observations into numerical weather forecast models

Samira Khodayar Pardo is currently the leader of the Meteorology group and distinguished researcher of excellence - CIDEGENT - at the Center for Environmental Studies of the Mediterranean (CEAM). She has a degree in Physics from the Department of Earth Physics and Thermodynamics of the University of Valencia, she received a doctorate in Physics from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. After spending a research period in the department of atmospheric physics at the University of York in Toronto, Canada, in recent years she has worked as an associate researcher at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK-TRO) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany), recognized as one of the world's most prestigious centers on the subject. In this center, in the last 5 years she directed the Research Group "Weather extremes under Climate Change" (BMBF; German Ministry of Education; budget: 1.8 Mill.) until 2018 when she returned to Spain after being consecutively granted with the excellence projects SEJI and GenT-CIDEGENT of the Generalitat Valenciana.

Her area of ​​expertise includes the investigation of the meteorological characteristics of the Mediterranean region in a context of climate change with special emphasis on extreme precipitation and temperature phenomena, as well as soil-atmosphere feedback processes. With the main objective of improving the understanding, quantification, and modeling of the hydrological cycle in the Mediterranean, with emphasis on the predictability and evolution of extreme meteorological phenomena, she uses the synergy of state-of-the-art observations and cutting-edge high-resolution regional climate models. She has participated in numerous international and national projects, has received numerous international competitive grants to develop her line of research, and has supervised a large number of students to date, including direct supervision of 6 doctoral students in the last 5 years. She is a member of the International Scientific Steering Committee (ISSC) of the Hydrological Cycle in the Mediterranean Experiment (HyMeX) and main coordinator of the Heavy Precipitation Scientific Research Team (ST-HP) with more than 100 members in the same program. Since 2019 she has been a member of the Global Earth / Atmosphere System Study Panel (GLASS), which is one of the four central panels of the GEWEX project (Global Energy and Water Interchanges) of the World Climate Research Program (WRCP).