Matthias Roth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. He holds a diploma in Natural Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland and MSc and PhD degrees from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His main academic interest is to understand how land-use changes affect local climates with a particular focus on the climate of cities and the role they play in climate change. As an experimental researcher he has conducted observations of the energy balance, carbon dioxide fluxes and fundamental turbulence properties in North American, European and Asian cities during the last 20 years. He has held academic appointments in Canada and Japan and in 2006/2007 was a visiting professor at ETH-Zürich and visiting scholar at ASU in Tempe (USA). He is a certified consulting meteorologist (Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society), President of the International Association for Urban Climate and member of the board of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.

Tim Oke is Professor Emeritus and former Head, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He holds a PhD from McMaster University and an Honorary Doctorate from Lód? University. His research interests are in micro-, urban and boundary layer meteorology. He is author of Boundary Layer Climates and over 200 scientific publications. He has been editor or a board member of eight journals. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American, Canadian and Royal Meteorological Societies, the Royal Canadian Geographic Society and the Guggenheim Foundation. Other honours include the Helmut E. Landsberg Award (American Meteorological Society), Massey Medal (Royal Canadian Geographical Society) and the Luke Howard Award (International Association for Urban Climate). He is Emeritus President of the International Association for Urban Climate and has served WMO in many roles since 1970.

Gerald Mill received his BA in Geography and History at University College Dublin, Ireland, in 1980 and completed a research Master’s degree there between 1981 and 1983. His research examined the synoptic origins of precipitation in Ireland during the period 1970-1980. This work was supervised by Stuart Daultrey. He attended Ohio State University as a PhD student concentrating on the areas of climatology and cartography. His PhD dissertation was on the energy budget of urban streets (or canyons) using modelling and field observations. Since 1997, he has taught geography at University College Dublin.

Most of his research work has been in the area of urban climates, such as modelling the energy exchanges within cities and the transfer of urban climate knowledge into urban design and planning. He is a member of the World Meteorological Organisation's Expert Team on urban climates.

Sue Grimmond completed her undergraduate degree (BSc Hons) at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and graduate degrees (MSc and PhD) at the University of British Columbia (Canada). She joined King's College, London, United Kingdom, in January 2006 after being Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. She is past President of the International Association of Urban Climate and is currently Lead Expert for the WMO Expert Team on Urban and Building Climatology. Sue is on the editorial boards of Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology and Advances in Meteorology. In 2006, she was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded Doctor of Science Honoris Causa, from Göteborg University, Sweden. In 2008 she was awarded the Universitatis Lodziensis Amico Medal from the University of Lód?, Poland. She is the 2009 recipient of the Helmut E. Landsberg Award from the American Meteorological Society.

Yinka Adebayo is currently Chief of the Education and Training Division at the WMO Secretariat. Yinka has a BS and an MS from the Faculty of Science (1980 and 1982, respectively), and a PhD (1985) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Since 1983, he taught climatology, hydrology and related environmental sciences at a number of universities in Nigeria, Kenya and Germany. Prior to joining the staff of WMO, Yinka served as a consultant and then as staff member of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi. He was also Principal Environmental Officer with the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. He has supervised and examined a number of post-graduate theses up to doctoral level. He has authored several scientific articles in academic and professional journals and has served as peer-reviewer of hundreds of articles, especially as a member of the editorial board of journals. Yinka is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (United Kingdom). He belongs to various professional bodies and has given policy advisory services to several governments, institutions and professionals worldwide.

Zifa Wang has been Deputy Director of the Nansen-Zhu International Centre of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, since 2003. He is the editor of the Chinese Journal of Atmospheric Sciences and of the journal Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere. He was in charge of air-quality modelling for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. He developed a nested air quality prediction modelling system, which is a tool to study air pollution, such as Asian duststorms, across a regional and urban scale and is widely used in several cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Shenzhen, as a real time forecasting model of air quality. It was included in a multiple model intercomparison project.

He received his BSc from the Nanjing Institute of Meteorology Atmospheric Sensing in 1993 and his PhD from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in 1997. He studied and worked in Japan from 1998 to 2002. His research interests are atmospheric environment modelling, air pollution forecasting and duststorm modelling

Michael Hebbert is Professor of Town Planning at the University of Manchester. His first degree was in Modern History at Merton College Oxford and his doctorate in Geography at the University of Reading. During a 35-year academic career at Oxford Polytechnic, the London School of Economics and Manchester he has published widely on the history of town planning and the uses of natural and social science in the planning process. He is currently engaged on a major project on urban climate knowledge and urban design based on comparative case studies of municipal applications of urban climatology, with funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council. He edits the Elsevier journal Progress in Planning.

Currently Secretary of the Committee on Housing and Land Management at UNECE. She has been previously working with UNEP in different positions at the Environment Management Group in Geneva, at the Secretariat of the Convention of Migratory Species in Bonn and at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal. She started her UN career in New York at the UN Division for Sustainable Development. Previously she has been working with the academia at the University of British Columbia in Berkeley and University of British Columbia in Vancouver on urban sustainability issues. Paola is an architect and holds a Ph.D in Territorial/enviromental Planning.

Mathias Rotach heads Bio- and EnvironmMathias Rotach heads Bio- and Environmental Meteorology in the Swiss Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to this position, he was head of the Competence Center on Research and Development in the Swiss Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology. He chairs the Forecast Demonstration Project MAP-D-PHASE of WMO's World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) WMO on ensemble he avy rain and flood forecasting in complex terrain (Alps). Also he chaired the Consortium on Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) From 1996 to 2003, he was head of the Boundary Layer Group at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He has had various visiting scientist positions: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Ecole Centrale de Nantes. From 1992 to 1996, he did post-doctorates at Risø National Lab, Denmark and ETH. Mathias’s research focuses on urban meteorology, mountain meteorology and atmospheric boundary layer turbulence. He holds a doctorate in atmospheric physics, with a focus on turbulence in urban environment, from ETH. ental Meteorology in the Swiss Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss , Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to this position, he was head of Climate Change Research and Development in the Swiss Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology. He chairs the Consortium on Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) and the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Forecast Demonstration Project MAP-D-PHASE: Demonstration of ensemble flood forecasting in complex terrain (Alps). From 1996 to 2003, he was head of the Boundary Layer Group at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He has had various visiting scientist positions: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Ecole Centrale de Nantes. From 1992 to 1996, he did post-doctorates at Risø National Lab, Denmark and ETH. Mathias’s research focuses on urban meteorology, mountain meteorology and atmospheric boundary layer turbulence. He holds a doctorate in atmospheric physics, with a focus on turbulence in urban environment, from ETH.