Honoring AGU Members

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) announced the election of its 2014 fellows, award winners, and honorary members in September 2013. Awards and medals were presented at the 2014 AMS meeting in February. Following are AGU members honored by AMS.

Pawan Kumar Bhartia, senior research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s (GSFC) Laboratory for the Atmospheres in Greenbelt, Md., received the Remote Sensing Prize for his “scientific advances in the remote sensing of global ozone concentration and trends, and for developing new techniques for retrieving aerosol properties from space.”

Robert Earl Dickinson, professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences of the University of Texas in Austin, was elected an honorary member of AMS.

Andrew E. Dessler, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University at College Station, received the Louis J. Battan Author’s Award for Introduction to Modern Climate Change, a “textbook for non-science majors that uniquely immerses the reader in the science, impacts, economics, policies, and political debate associated with climate change.”

Randal D. Koster, research scientist in NASA GSFC’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, was the Robert E. Horton lecturer in hydrology. He was selected for his “creative and groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of land-surface processes, land-atmosphere interactions, and their impact on climate predictability.”

Ray Leuning, honorary research fellow and former chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia, received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Biometeorology for “significantly advancing our understanding of plant functioning, from stomata to terrestrial biosphere, and outstanding contributions to the global flux network through advancing micrometeorological theory.”

Jennifer MacKinnon, associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., received the Nicholas P. Fofonoff Award for her “outstanding contributions to the understanding of internal mixing in the ocean, artfully synthesizing observations, theory, and numerical modeling.”

David A. Randall, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Colorado State University in Fort Collins, received the Jule G. Charney Award for his “transformative research into atmospheric convection and cloud processes and their improved representation in global weather and climate models.”

Courtney Schumacher, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University in College Station, won the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award for her “innovative use of observations to clarify the vertical structure of latent heating and the geographical distribution of convective and stratiform precipitation.”

Owen Brian Toon, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, received the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal for his “fundamental contributions toward understanding the role of clouds and aerosols in the climates of Earth and other planets.”

Peter J. Webster, scientist in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, was the Bernhard Haurwitz Memorial lecturer for 2014. Webster was chosen for his “insights into the dynamics of the large-scale tropical atmosphere; their interactions with convection, oceans, and land; and application to forecasting weather disasters in developing countries.”

Christine Wiedinmyer, scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., was chosen as the Walter Orr Roberts lecturer in Interdisciplinary Sciences for her “research on biomass burning and its impact on the atmosphere and terrestrial biosphere, and bridging atmospheric science, biology, engineering, public health, and other disciplines.”

Donald J. Wuebbles, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received the Cleveland Abbe Award for Distinguished Service to Atmospheric Science for his “tireless and highly effective contributions to society through rigorous scientific analysis and distinguished public engagement.”

Many of AMS’s 2014 fellows are AGU members, including Steven Ackerman, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, associate dean of the university’s College of Letters and Sciences, and director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies; Edgar Andreas, senior research scientist at NorthWest Research Associates, Inc., in Lebanon, N.H.; Alan Blumberg, George Meade Bond Professor and director of the Center for Maritime Systems at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.; Paul Dirmeyer, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University and research scientist at the university’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies in Fairfax, Va.; William Gail, AMS president for 2014 and cofounder and chief technology officer of Global Weather Corporation in Boulder, Colo.; Gerald Geernaert, director of the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division of the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research in Washington, D. C.; D. E. Harrison, oceanographer at the Ocean Climate Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and affiliate professor at the School of Oceanography and affiliate professor at the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Washington in Seattle; Michael Jamilkowski, the Joint Polar Satellite System Common Ground System customer liaison for Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems in Greenbelt, Md.; and Yochanan Kushnir, Lamont Research Professor at the LamontDoherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University in Palisades, N.Y.

Sydney Levitus, now retired, formerly chief of the NOAA National Oceanic Data Center’s Ocean Climate Laboratory in Washington, D.C., was elected an AMS fellow and received the Verner E. Suomi Award for his “pioneering work in climate science by analyzing and computing the ocean’s heat content and making oceanographic data readily available to the scientific community.” John Marshall, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in Cambridge, was selected as an AMS fellow and received the Sverdrup Gold Medal Award for his “fundamental insights into water mass transformation and deep convection and their implications for global climate and its variability.”

Other new AMS fellows who are AGU members are Robert McCoy, director of the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks; P. C. D. Milly, research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, N.J.; James N. Moum, professor of physical oceanography in Oregon State University’s College of Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences in Corvallis; Rachel T. Pinker, professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Meteorology in College Park; Karen Rosenlof, meteorologist and program lead at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, Chemical Sciences Division in Boulder, Colo.; Richard Seager, Palisades Geophysical Institute/Lamont Research Professor at LDEO; LuAnne Thompson, professor of physical oceanography in the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography in Seattle; Duane Waliser, chief scientist at the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; Donald A. Wilhite, climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Chidong Zhang, professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami, Fla..

Ten AGU members received AMS Editor’s Awards for their achievements and contributions to academic journals or scientific publications, including Ali Belmadani, assistant professor in the Department of Geophysics and faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of Universidad de Concepción in Chile, for his work in the Journal of Physical Oceanography; Sarah T. Gille, professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, for her work in the Journal of Physical Oceanography; James Kirchner, professor in ETH Zurich’s Department of Environmental Sciences, Switzerland, for his work in the Journal of Hydrometeorology; Jessica Lundquist, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, University of Washington in Seattle, for her work in the Journal of Hydrometeorology; Kelly T. Redmond, research professor and regional climatologist at the Western Regional Climate Center, Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., for his work in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; Paul Schopf, chair of George Mason University’s Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences in Fairfax, Va., for his work in the Journal of Climate; Ricardo Todling, meteorologist at NASA’s GSFC for his work in the Monthly Weather Review; Gabriele Villarini, assistant professor at the University of Iowa at Iowa City, for his work in the Journal of Climate; Christopher R. Williams, research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, for his work in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology; and ChunChieh Wu, professor at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, for his work in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

Features from AGU Journals