Weather · Climate · Ocean
Ilya Drigo
Oceanographer and meteorologist. I work on weather, climate and ocean data for companies that have to make decisions with it.
Client Solutions Lead at OpenWeather
About
How I got here
I studied oceanography at Moscow State University and spent field seasons as a hydrometeorology engineer on marine expeditions. A Master's in applied maths and machine learning at ITMO moved me toward AI-driven forecasting, mostly of Arctic sea ice.
Then I moved to industry: meteorology research at Windy.app, four years at Yandex Weather as a senior research meteorologist, a period of independent consulting, and now OpenWeather. I have led more than 50 B2B projects in insurance, agriculture, energy and oil & gas. My current work is technical pre-sales and solution design: I tell clients what a model will and will not do for them.
I kept doing research the whole time. Most recently I spent two and a half months in the Tropical Atlantic as a physical oceanographer, measuring deep channel currents; those papers are under review. I still run WRF in my own time.
- 9+
- years in weather & climate
- 50+
- B2B projects led
- $200K+
- revenue from climate risk deals
- 4
- marine expeditions
Experience
Where I've been
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May 2026 — now
Client Solutions Lead · OpenWeather
I am the meteorologist on the commercial side. I own technical pre-sales and solution design for enterprise clients across API, bulk data and forecasting use cases, and translate what people ask for into what the data can support. I also lead an R&D project on extreme weather event forecasting, where I shipped a correction algorithm for the solar energy model, and I started an internal webinar series on how forecasting works.
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2025 — 2026
Independent Consultant & Researcher
Weather intelligence, ML and physical oceanography on contract. I led a team building a statistical climate-risk model on the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble, covering hazard indices, scenario comparison and uncertainty quantification. I also built a probabilistic forecasting pipeline on ECMWF AIFS, advised large enterprises on ESG and climate risk data, and productionised an ML wind-forecast tool for sailors, which I originally wrote for myself.
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2021 — 2025
Senior Research Meteorologist · Yandex Weather
Primary meteorological consultant and technical lead on more than 50 B2B projects at a hyperlocal forecasting service with over 80M monthly users. I brought in $200K+ across ten climate-risk deals in agriculture and oil & gas, launched a precipitation nowcasting product that raised ARPU by 20% in exposed cohorts, built high-resolution WRF hail hindcasting for catastrophe insurance, and improved urban forecast accuracy by 23%. I represented the company at more than 15 conferences.
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2019 — 2021
Meteorology Research Lead · Windy.app
Weather research for an outdoor app with more than 10M installs. I delivered 15+ B2B forecasting solutions for wind and solar generation, an enterprise nowcasting system over multi-radar networks with 75% probability of detection at 10-minute lead time, operational WRF for coastal Europe and Japan, and weather-routing algorithms for maritime clients. I also wrote the API documentation that cut B2B onboarding time by 40%.
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2018 — 2020
Research Assistant · ITMO University
I coupled the NEMO sea-ice model with a deep-learning model trained on satellite observations and cut ice-thickness forecast RMSE by 19%. The work produced peer-reviewed papers and grants, along with applied projects for oil & gas majors.
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2017 — 2018
Lead Hydrometeorology Engineer · Marine Research Center, MSU
Physical oceanography lead on three marine expeditions: survey design, ADCP and CTD measurements, and QA/QC automation that halved report turnaround.
M.Sc. Applied & Computational Mathematics (Big Data & ML), ITMO University
B.Sc. Hydrometeorology and Oceanography, Moscow State University, with honours
Toolbox
What I work with
- Weather & climate
- WRF, MPAS, NEMO · AI models (ECMWF AIFS, GraphCast, Pangu-Weather) · ensemble and probabilistic forecasting · verification and skill scoring · radar nowcasting · CMIP6 climate risk · GRIB2, NetCDF, Zarr
- ML & data science
- PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn · deep learning on spatiotemporal data · statistical downscaling and bias correction · uncertainty quantification · MLOps
- Code & infrastructure
- Python, R, Fortran, SQL · xarray, GeoPandas, NumPy, SciPy, Dask, ClickHouse · Docker, Ansible, Airflow, AWS · HPC/Slurm, OpenMP/MPI · ETL and CI/CD
- Client-facing work
- Technical pre-sales · requirements discovery · solution design · B2B negotiation · onboarding and integration support · API documentation · talks, workshops, mentoring
Selected work
Research, publications and talks
Personal
Outside of work
Sailing takes most of the time left over, enough that I built an ML wind forecast tool for the people I sail with. I also run a popular-science channel about the ocean, marine expeditions and forecasting, and I give talks on those subjects when asked.
Contact
Get in touch
I am glad to talk about weather data, climate risk, ocean modelling or boats. The full CV is a two-page PDF if you prefer the formal version.