In Memoriam Prof. Ad de Roo

It is with great sadness that we must inform you that Prof. Ad de Roo passed away on 26 September after a short but ferocious and inequitable battle with pancreas cancer. Ad de Roo worked for the European Commission Joint Research Centre (EC-JRC) in Ispra, Italy as a senior scientist and as a professor at Utrecht University.

Under his passionate and professional guidance the European Flood Alert System EFAS (www.efas.eu) was developed and made operational at ECMWF in Reading. The basis of EFAS was his PhD work at Utrecht University from 1988 to 1993. Ad de Roo occupied an endowed chair of ‘Hazards and Impact’ at our department since 2011. The collaboration with the JRC, via Ad, was very productive for our department for many years. As EFAS is running in the UU developed software PCRaster Environmental Software, the collaboration between the team of Ad and the PCRaster development group was always intensive and productive.

Ad was doctoral supervisor at Utrecht University of Vera Thiemig (2014), Niko Wanders (2015) and Beatriz Revilla Romero (2016). He (co-) supervised various bachelor and master students with their thesis work and welcomed many interns at the JRC working on flood modelling and flood forecasting. Ad contributed for over 12 years to the master course Hazards & Risk Assessment where he covered topics such as flood risk, flood modelling and transboundary challenges of hazard assessment.

We will miss him sorely and extend our love and sad condolences to his wife and children: Dorien, Tim, Kevin and Michelle.

Board and staff members Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences