BAMOS
Dec 2019
Announcements
Two new AMOS Fellows elected in
2019
Two AMOS members have been elected as AMOS Fellows in 2019. Congratulations to Professor Lisa Alexander and Dr
Rachel Law whose outstanding achievements have earned them this distinction. Brief summaries of their careers and
contributions are given below.
Professor Lisa Alexander Dr Rachel Law
Lisa Alexander is a senior researcher with the Climate Change
Research Centre at the University of New South Wales since
2009. Lisa’s early career research at the Met Office Hadley
Centre concentrated on understanding the variability and
driving mechanisms of climate extremes. Her primary work is
improving understanding of observed changes in these events
using multiple research tools ranging from station observations
to climate model output. She pioneered approaches for
quantifying variations in extreme daily temperature and rainfall
through the development of global datasets that form the basis
for analyses of changes in temperature and rainfall extremes in
many parts of the world. Her work has contributed to a better
understanding of processes important for the occurrence of
temperature and rainfall extremes, and rigorous evaluation of
model simulations of extremes and their likely changes in the
future. Lisa is internationally recognised as one of Australia’s
leading contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and a member of the World Climate Research
Programme (WCRP) Joint Scientific Committee. She is also the
co‑lead of the WCRP Grand Challenge on Extremes and chairs
the WMO Expert Team on sector‐specific Climate Indices. Lisa
is the Chief Editor of Weather and Climate Extremes and has
supervised several students and post‑docs. Dr Rachel Law has had a distinguished 25‑year career in CSIRO
as an international leader in modelling the carbon cycle and
interpreting greenhouse gas measurements to better quantify
carbon emissions in the context of managing climate change.
Her research on blending Earth System Model simulations
with greenhouse gas observations to quantify and reduce the
uncertainty in regional and global carbon budgets—especially
greenhouse gas emissions—has had high impact and been
influential in ongoing discussions around greenhouse gas
monitoring, reporting and verification. Serving as “CABLE
Coordinator” from 2012–2017 Rachel united the land surface
model development and user community across Australia
to take a coordinated and strategic approach to developing
CABLE as Australia’s community land surface model—for use
in ecology, resource management and coupled climate and
Earth System model simulations. Rachel has made seminal
contributions to national priorities in Earth system modelling
capability through her leadership of CSIRO’s ACCESS group
and the national weather, climate and Earth System model
development effort. She helped deliver the first Australian
model with an interactive carbon cycle, contributing an
ACCESS ESM series of simulations into CMIP6, and then the
IPCC AR6. Rachel is also a passionate advocate for STEM,
dedicating considerable time and energy to supporting early
career researchers.
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