Jianping Li is Dean and Professor at the College of Global Change and Earth System Sciences (GCESS), Beijing Normal University. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the University of Hawaii, a Fellow of International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) and a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. His major research interests include climate dynamics and climate change, predictability, monsoons, and annular modes. He is Vice-Chair of the IUGG Commission on Climatic and Environmental Change (CCEC), and Executive Secretary of the International Commission of Climate (ICCL) within IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences). Richard Swinbank is a Scientific Manager in Weather Science at the Met Office in the UK and a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. He is currently President of the IAMAS International Commission on Dynamical Meteorology (ICDM) and Co-Chair of the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) working group on Predictability, Dynamics and Ensemble Forecasting (PDEF). His research interests include ensemble forecasting, data assimilation, atmospheric dynamics and predictability of high-impact weather. Richard Grotjahn is Professor of Climate Dynamics at the University of California, Davis. He is currently Secretary of the ICDM commission of IAMAS, and is Co-Chair of the US CLIVAR working group on Large Scale Circulation Patterns Associated with Extremes. His research interests include extreme weather, climate model assessment, and large scale atmospheric synoptic-dynamics. Hans Volkert is Senior Scientist at the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre (IPA), Germany, and currently serves as the Secretary-General of IAMAS. He was appointed by the Council of the IUGG in 2011 as one of the Union's three liaison officers to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with a focus on atmospheric issues. His main research interests are in mesoscale meteorology, weather forecasting, and the development of meteorology as a branch of physics.