BAMOS Vol 30 No. 4 2017 | Page 8

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BAMOS Dec 2017

News

AMOS award winners for 2017

Neville Nicholls AMOS Awards Committee
Uwe Radok Award : Nicola Maher
The Uwe Radok Award is an annual award for the best PhD thesis for the preceding year in the fields of meteorology , oceanography , glaciology or climatology .
Nicola Maher completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales where her supervisors were Professor Matthew England and Dr Alex Sen Gupta . Her dissertation titled Natural drivers of Interannual to Decadal Variations in Surface Climate received ‘ A ’ grades from both her examiners , and her research resulted in six journal publications , and to her being awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship to undertake research at one of the world ’ s top climate research centres , the Max Planck Institute ( MPI ) in Hamburg . Her citations already exceed 200 , even though her papers are only a few years old . Her work on decadal climate variability and the impacts of explosive volcanoes on Indo-Pacific climate has been particularly influential . Nicola has already twice been an invited keynote speaker at international meetings , and has given seminars at leading international climate laboratories including Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ( GFDL , USA ), the National Center for Atmospheric Research ( NCAR , USA ), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL , USA ), the UK Met Office , and the University of Exeter . In 2015 she was awarded the Best Student Presentation at the International Workshop on Modelling the Ocean .
Priestley Medal : Julie Arblaster & Jason Evans
The Priestley Medal is a biennial award aimed at scientists in their mid-careers no older than 45 years for personal excellence in meteorological , oceanographic or climate research carried out substantially within Australia . Note : This is the first time AMOS has awarded the Priestley Medal to two scientists in the one year .
Julie Arblaster is an Associate Professor in the School of Earth , Atmosphere & Environment at Monash University . Julie has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of climate variability and change . Her research has covered a range of topics in climate science , from tropical meteorology to the Antarctic ozone hole . From 1996 to 2003 , Julie held various posts at NCAR , where she was a member of the team that developed the Parallel Climate Model . From 2003 to 2016 Julie was based at the Bureau of Meteorology , after which she moved to Monash University , maintaining close contact with NCAR . Julie ’ s work has attracted a great deal of attention , both within scientific circles and as the basis for action on climate change . Julie is internationally recognized for her work on aspects of Australian climate associated with processes influencing decadal variability of the Asian-Australian monsoon as well as the Southern Annular Mode ( SAM ). She has conducted pioneering research with climate models to demonstrate the relative roles of changes of stratospheric ozone and greenhouse gases in the evolution of the SAM into a more positive state and how that has contributed to decreases in southern Australian rainfall .