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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.