Weather — Climate — Ocean
Ilya Drigo
Oceanographer and meteorologist. I turn weather, climate and ocean data into things businesses can actually use.
Client Solutions Lead at OpenWeather
About
From research vessels to enterprise weather
I started out in science — oceanography at Moscow State University, with field seasons as a hydrometeorology engineer on marine expeditions. Then a Master's in applied maths and machine learning at ITMO nudged me toward AI-driven forecasting, mostly Arctic sea ice.
Industry came next: meteorology research at Windy.app, four years at Yandex Weather as a senior research meteorologist, a stretch consulting on my own, and now OpenWeather. Somewhere in there I led 50+ B2B projects across insurance, agriculture, energy and oil & gas. These days I own technical pre-sales and solution design — I'm the person in the room who can say what a model will and won't actually do for you.
I never quite left research. Most recently: two and a half months in the Tropical Atlantic as a physical oceanographer, chasing deep channel currents, with the papers now under review. I still run WRF for fun, which probably tells you everything.
- 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
The meteorologist on the commercial side. I own technical pre-sales and solution design for enterprise clients — API, bulk data, forecasting use cases — and translate what people ask for into what the data can give them. Also leading an R&D project on extreme weather event forecasting (shipped a correction algorithm for the solar energy model), and I founded an internal webinar series on how forecasting actually works.
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2025 — 2026
Independent Consultant & Researcher
Weather intelligence, ML and physical oceanography, for hire. Led a team building a statistical climate-risk model on the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble — hazard indices, scenario comparison, uncertainty quantification. 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, mostly because I wanted it myself.
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2021 — 2025
Senior Research Meteorologist · Yandex Weather
Primary meteorological consultant and technical lead on 50+ B2B projects at a hyperlocal forecasting service with 80M+ monthly users. Drove $200K+ from ten climate-risk deals in agriculture and oil & gas, launched a precipitation nowcasting product (+20% ARPU in exposed cohorts), built high-resolution WRF hail hindcasting for catastrophe insurance, and pushed urban forecast accuracy up 23%. Spoke for the company at 15+ conferences.
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2019 — 2021
Meteorology Research Lead · Windy.app
Weather research for a 10M+ install outdoor app. 15+ B2B forecasting solutions around wind and solar generation, an enterprise nowcasting system over multi-radar networks (75% probability of detection at 10-minute lead time), operational WRF for coastal Europe and Japan, and weather-routing algorithms for maritime clients. Wrote the API docs that cut B2B onboarding time by 40%.
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2018 — 2020
Research Assistant · ITMO University
Coupled the NEMO sea-ice model with a deep-learning model trained on satellite observations — ice-thickness forecast RMSE down 19%. Peer-reviewed papers, grants, and applied work for oil & gas majors along the way.
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2017 — 2018
Lead Hydrometeorology Engineer · Marine Research Center, MSU
Physical oceanography lead across three marine expeditions: survey design, ADCP and CTD work, and QA/QC automation that halved report turnaround.
M.Sc. Applied & Computational Mathematics (Big Data & ML) — ITMO University
B.Sc. Hydrometeorology / Oceanography — Moscow State University, with honours
Toolbox
What I actually 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
- The client-facing half
- 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 is the main thing — 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 how forecasting works, and I'll happily give a talk about any of it to anyone who asks.
Contact
Get in touch
Always up for a conversation about weather data, climate risk, ocean modelling — or boats. The full CV is a two-page PDF if you'd rather read the formal version.