Researchers recognized during organization’s annual meeting in January in Seattle, Washington
The shock hasn’t worn off for Pierre Gentine.
Gentine, an ARM Climate Research Facility user, won the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award, one of several honors handed out during the 97th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in January in Seattle, Washington.
Gentine is an associate professor at Columbia University in New York. He received the Meisinger Award “for fundamental and diverse contributions to the understanding of land-atmosphere interactions, atmospheric convection, and ecohydrology,” according to the AMS website.
Colleague Adam Sobel, the 2010 Meisinger Award winner, nominated Gentine for the award.
“I was mostly very surprised to get it,” Gentine says. “That’s a big deal. My work is very interdisciplinary so you don’t know where you fit. They were extremely open-minded in giving me the award.”
Gentine is a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program five-year grant recipient (2015 to 2020) for his Cross-Scale Land-Atmosphere Experiment (CSLAEX). In June, Gentine will head to the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) megasite and help with the installation of a fiber optic cable that will span over a mile. The campaign aims to explore land-atmosphere processes across multiple spatial scales and investigate the effect of landscape heterogeneity.
“We can measure temperature along the cable at every 10 centimeters and every second,” he says.
Gentine was a co-investigator for last year’s Holistic Interactions of Shallow Clouds, Aerosols, and Land-Ecosystems (HI-SCALE) field campaign at the SGP site.
McFarquhar, Li, Revercomb, Yuter, Gutowski become AMS Fellows
Meanwhile, Greg McFarquhar, lead scientist for the Measurements of Aerosols, Radiation, and Clouds over the Southern Ocean (MARCUS) field campaign starting in September 2017, was one of 26 AMS Fellows for 2017.
“Those eligible for election to Fellow shall have made outstanding contributions to the atmospheric or related oceanic or hydrologic sciences or their applications during a substantial period of years,” the AMS constitution says.
Fellow nominations are open to the society’s members. Individuals are elected each year at the AMS council’s fall meeting.
McFarquhar, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also is involved with the Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign. CACTI starts in August 2018 in the Sierras de Córdoba mountain range of north-central Argentina.
McFarquhar says the most surprising aspect of his research has been the difficulty in measuring the basic properties of clouds.
“Seeing how we’ve managed to reduce the uncertainty over the years has been quite nice,” he says.
ARM users Zhanqing Li, Hank Revercomb, Sandra Yuter, and Bill Gutowski also were named 2017 AMS Fellows.
Li, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, led a 2008 ARM campaign, “Application of the ARM Mobile Facility (AMF) to Study the Aerosol Indirect Effects in China.” He is the chief scientist for a program starting in China that focuses on aerosol, cloud, and climate studies. Li and his team have used ARM data extensively, leading to more than 100 publications that can be found in the ARM publications database.
Li says ARM instruments are “so unique and were not available in China,” and that thanks to those tools, researchers obtained the first image of a cloud vertical profile in the country. It ignited a wave of atmospheric observation experiments in the region, filling a major gap for testing global climate models.
“ARM’s impact goes well beyond the ARM community,” he says.
Revercomb, who worked with the ARM Facility for almost two decades, was the principal investigator for the development of the atmospheric emitted radiance interferometer (AERI), an instrument important to the ARM Facility. Revercomb is a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center.
Yuter, a professor at North Carolina State University, served on the ARM Facility Science Board from 2006 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2010. Gutowski is a professor at Iowa State University.
Other honorees
Yuan Wang, an ARM Facility user and a research scientist at the California Institute of Technology, received an AMS editor’s award for work on Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. The award recognized “… multiple timely, penetrating, and constructive reviews on subjects ranging from cloud physics and aerosols to climate.”
Congratulations also go to AMS honorary members and ARM users Thomas Vonder Haar and Margaret LeMone. Vonder Haar is the founding director emeritus of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere. LeMone is an emerita senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Nominations open for 2018
Deadlines to submit 2018 nominations are May 1, 2017, for awards, fellows, and lecturers, and July 1, 2017, for honorary members. The next AMS annual meeting is January 7 to 11, 2018, in Austin, Texas.
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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a national scientific user facility funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The ARM Facility is operated by nine Department of Energy national laboratories.