Gert-Jan Steeneveld is an associate professor in the Meteorology and Air Quality Section at Wageningen University, president of the Dutch Meteorological Society, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the European Meteorological Society. His research focuses on understanding the urban atmosphere through modeling and observations, with a special interest in urban heat, health, and energy. To this end, he coordinates the Amsterdam Atmospheric Monitoring Supersite, which includes a 24-station weather observation network and carbon footprint monitoring. He also utilizes opportunistic sensing by exploring weather data collected through citizen science, crowdsourcing, and smartphone battery temperature records.
Additionally, his group has brought weather forecasting to the neighborhood (hectometer) scale for Amsterdam and developed the method for drawing heatmaps used in climate stress tests.
A recent project is the EU-funded I-CHANGE initiative, in which indoor temperature data are collected from 100 Amsterdam residences to measure summertime heat exposure and provide citizens with information to adapt to indoor heat. Gert-Jan also leads a work package in the 4TU.HERITAGE project, which studies the climate resilience of the aging building stock through high-tech sensing and numerical modeling.
Within the CSI Trees project, he investigates future climatological conditions to select suitable tree species—assessing their resilience to frost and drought—to provide ecosystem services such as shade and evapotranspiration in a changing climate. He also leads the NLeScienceCenter-funded “Urban-M4” project, in which urban thermal morphology parameters are derived from Streetview images using machine learning techniques. These parameters are then mapped and incorporated into high-resolution urban weather forecasting models.
Gert-Jan is co-chair of the International Conference on Urban Climate (www.icuc12.eu), board member of the International Association on Urban Climate, president of the Harry Otten Foundation for Innovation in Meteorology, chief editor of the Journal of the European Meteorological Society, president of the Dutch Meteorological Society (www.nvbm.nl), and national host of the European Meteorological Society Annual meeting in Utrecht in 2026.
His activities at AMS Institute as a Principal Investigator (PI) are part of the Climate Resilient Cities theme, which promotes knowledge development and practical applications to reduce urban heat load. He brings his MSc students to AMS Institute and offers lifelong learning activities on climate-resilient urban design, with a focus on applications in Amsterdam. Furthermore, he collaborates with the MIT Smart Cities Lab at AMS Institute on the development of smart and mobile technologies to map urban heat.
“Climate resilient cities require coupled solutions for heat, droughts and floodings.”
Gert-Jan Steeneveld
Associate professor Meteorology and Air Quality
