Vladimir Kattsov is Director of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory in St Petersburg, Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environment. His main scientific interests are global climate 3D modelling; high-latitude climate dynamics and model evaluation. He has published some 60 scientific publications in Russian and international peer-reviewed journals and books. Vladimir was lead author of the IPCC Working Group I Third (2001) and Fourth (2007) Assessment Reports, with particular responsibility for evaluation of cryospheric components of state-of-the-art atmosphere ocean general circulation models, and lead author of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. He is a member of the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and a former member of the Commission for Atmospheric Science/JSC Working Group on Numerical Experimentation and of the WCRP Climate and Cryosphere Project Scientific Steering Group.

James (Jim) Hurrell is a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the Climate Dynamics Division (CGD). Presently, he is Chief Scientist of Community Climate Projects in CGD, which includes the Community Climate System Model. Jim is also the former Director of CGD, and he is currently Co-Chair of the World Climate Research Programme Project on Climate Variability and Predictability. Jim's research has centered on empirical and modeling studies and diagnostic analyses to better understand climate, climate variability and climate change. He has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and has given more than 100 professional invited and keynote talks. He is a Highly Cited Researcher (Thomson-ISI), a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a recipient of the Society's prestigious Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award. Jim currently serves on the AMS Council as well as numerous other national and international scientific committees.

Carolina Vera is Vice-Dean and Professor of the School of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is also Vice-Director of the Center for Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences, a joint institute of the University of Buenos Aires and the Argentine Council of Sciences.

Carolina was born in San Nicolas, Argentina, on 14 July 1962. She obtained her PhD in atmospheric sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in 1992, under Eugenia Kalnay. Her research interests focus on climate variability and change in South America.

She is currently Officer Member of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Joint Scientific Committee. She has also been Co-Chair of the WCRP/Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Panel for the Variability of the American Monsoon Systems; Chair of the American Meteorological Society/Scientific and Technological Activities Commission/Committee for Meteorology and Oceanography of the Southern Hemisphere; and Chair of the Scientific Committee of the South American Low-Level Jet experiment.

James Murphy joined the UK Met Office in 1981 and has spent his career working on projections of global and regional climate at various timescales. He is currently Head of Climate Prediction at the Met Office Hadley Centre. Recent interests include work on ensemble climate prediction, climate scenario development, regional climate modelling, extreme events and interannual-to-decadal prediction. James was a lead author in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) and has been involved in the development of the UKCP09 climate projections and in European climate projections through the ENSEMBLES project.

Panmao is now Director General of the Dept of Forecasting and Information System, China Meteorological Administration. He joined climate studies in National Climate Center of China Meteorological Administration in 1984 and worked as the chief scientist on climate diagnostics in NCC during 2001-2004. He has been invited as professor in China’s Academy of Meteorological Sciences since 1998 and professor of the Lanzhou University since 2004. He was the lead author of Chapter 3, WG I, IPCC AR4. He is now the Member of CAgM Management Group and Co-chair of OPAG 3 on Climate Change/Variability and Natural Disasters in Agriculture. His specialties include Study on Climate change and variability, Climate diagnostics, and ENSO prediction. His graduate and post graduate degrees in climatology were from Dept of Atmospheric Sciences of Nanjing University, China.

Rowan Sutton is Director of Climate Research at the United Kingdom National Centre for Atmospheric Science, based in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. Rowan’s research interests focus on understanding the role of ocean-atmosphere interactions in climate, climate variability and predictability, particularly in the Atlantic sector. Rowan was coordinator of the first ever European Union funded project on the science of decadal climate prediction (PREDICATE, 2000-2003). Recently he served as strategic adviser on climate science to the UK Natural Environment Research Council. He is a Royal Society Research Fellow and a member of the Walker Institute. He is Head of the Atlantic-European Climate Group, a member of the World Climate Research Programme CLIVAR Atlantic panel and Associate Editor, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Rowan is the author/co-author of more than 60 publications.

Senior Research Scientist: Coupled Model Development, Ocean Data Assimilation, Air-Sea Interactions, Seasonal - Decadal predictability and Prediction.