Nice to meet you! I am Ruben Imhoff, a hydrometeorologist working at the Operational Water Management and Early Warning Systems Department of the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands. I started studying at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. There, I did a bachelor’s and master’s in the field of Earth system sciences, with a focus on hydrology and meteorology. This interest in the Earth system, particularly in hydrology and meteorology, originates a bit from my hobby, gliding, through which I get to see the earth from above frequently. Earth’s processes have fascinated me ever since and I am happy I got the opportunity to learn more about it during my studies.
After my MSc, I continued to complete a PhD on the topic of rainfall nowcasting for flood early warning, which slowly brought me into the field of operational forecasting and flood early warning. To me, this field brings it all together: the fascinating part of better understanding the Earth system, with the urgency of providing the best possible information directly to enable decision makers to take action. Working with operational forecasting systems means that science has to be brought to practice through robust technical implementations and by ensuring that the provided information is actionable. This is exciting to me, as you get to see how your research can be put into practice.
Over the last several years, I have been working on a wide range of projects. Some of these were research projects where we directly tested the outcomes of our forecasts in practice, such as our work on improving short-term rainfall forecasting systems, through so-called nowcasting and seamless forecasting systems, together with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Other projects have focused more on the implementation of flood early warning systems (FEWS) at different locations around the world, including Ghana and Ethiopia. From these projects, I have learned a lot about what is needed to make an FEWS useful and especially sustainable long term. This requires an enormous amount of capacity building with local stakeholders and a very strong focus on what information is needed, dissemination pathways and standardized operation protocols that are locally relevant. This makes the social sciences side of a FEWS much more important than how we typically approach it in the forecasting community.
That is where InPRHA plays such an important role with its focus on the entire forecasting chain and its aim to bring together physical sciences, social sciences and local knowledge systems. I have been a member of InPRHA since its establishment in 2024. InPRHA has given me a fantastic opportunity to work with a group of international experts that cover the entire flood early warning chain, from observations to hydrometeorological models, forecasts and, eventually, to the dissemination and action side of it. With InPRHA, I can bring in a short-term hydrometeorological forecasting perspective and knowledge on implementing FEWS at different locations around the world. Since 2025, I have been co-lead of InPRHA’s task team on Precipitation to People, through which we try to find novel ways to make precipitation information better and more useful to the people that use it.
I think we still have large steps to make to improve flood early warning systems, but InPRHA has stepped in to fill a clear gap that still exists. I think, and hope, that we can make a few steps that contribute to the Early Warnings for All program of WMO, which is much more than ‘just’ having a FEWS everywhere on Earth. It is about having actionable flood early warning information at any time and for everyone, which requires including local knowledge systems and rethinking the way we make forecasts and warnings.
