Hilla Afargan-Gerstman

About me: I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the ETH Zürich, working with Prof. Dr. Daniela Domeisen in the group of Atmospheric Predictability. I am a recipient of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship.

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My research interests are stratosphere-troposphere coupling and stratospheric impact on mid-latitude weather and climate, in particular the impact of Sudden Stratospheric Warming events on extratropical storms and cold extremes. I am also interested in studying the potential for extending the prediction skill of surface weather in mid-latitude and polar regions on subseasonal-to-seasonal (beyond 10 days and up to three months) timescales.

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I am also interested in understanding the impact of climate change on extratropical storms and windstorm damage over Europe using CMIP6 and various statistical tools and platforms.

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The Domeisen group website:

https://iac.ethz.ch/group/atmospheric-predictability.html​

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I graduated my PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in March 2018. In my PhD, I was working with Prof. Yohai Kaspi on mechanisms controlling the seasonal variability of mid-latitude storm tracks. We used both reanalysis data and an idealized GCM, in which we implemented a seasonal cycle to study the storm track response to variations in the strength and location of the jet stream. We also studied the midwinter suppression of the Pacific storm track, a major open research question in the field of Atmospheric Dynamics.