Dr. Gerrit J.H. Burgers (The Hague, 1957) is head of the Weather Services Research & Development division of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). His main specific interests are data assimilation and ocean waves.

He was trained as a theoretical physicist at Leiden (PhD 1985). During 1986-1988, he was a Fellow at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), working at "radiative corrections". These are essential for the proper interpretation of elementary particle experiments. In 1989 he made the transition from particle physics to weather and climate, and joined KNMI.

At KNMI, first he worked on the modelling of ocean waves, which resulted in a new operational wave model being implemented at KNMI.

In 1993 he switched to El Niño. El Niño's are warmings of the Eastern Tropical Pacific that have far-reaching consequences for the climate of places all over the globe. Using models from the most large and complex CGCM's (Coupled General Circulation Models of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) to extremely simplified representations, he focuses on the predictability of El Niño and on better ways of extracting as much information as possible from observations. From 2001 to 2006 he was Head Oceanographic Research. In 2006 he became head of the Weather Services R&D division.