Meteorology awards for University weather expert quartet

Top scientists from the University of Reading have won awards for their dedication to developing weather research.

The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) awards are handed to researchers who have made significant contributions to meteorology.

The 2022 awards, announced today (Wednesday, 19 July), saw Professor Ed Hawkins, Dr Roger Brugge, Professor David Brayshaw and Professor Bryan Lawrence honoured.

Professor Ed Hawkins has been awarded the Hugh Robert Mill Award for Precipitation Research for his Rainfall Rescue project.

The project, launched in March 2020, led to national rainfall data from as far back as 1836 becoming available after Professor Hawkins and 16,000 volunteers helped to restore 66,000 pages of weather observations containing 5.2 million numbers. The venture was completed in 2022 and the results have provided more context around recent changes in rainfall due to human-caused climate change.

Professor Hawkins said: “As a nation, we love talking about the weather, and rainfall in particular. Recent experiences with droughts and floods across the UK have highlighted the need to learn more about past variations in rainfall to put these events into a longer-term context. The resulting data are now incorporated into the official UK rainfall statistics and have dramatically improved our estimates of rainfall patterns back to the early 1800s.”

Professor David Brayshaw was awarded The Adrian Gill Award for Advances at the Interface of Atmospheric Science and Related Disciplines. Professor Brayshaw, who recently cycled the route of the Tour de France to raise more than £1 million for national blood cancer charity Cure Leukaemia, won the award for his work applying the science of weather and climate to the increasingly important challenges facing the energy sector. This includes building an Energy-Meteorology research group, publishing in and editing RMetS journals, and becoming co-chair of the Society’s Energy Special Interest Group.

He said: “The last decade has seen rapid change in energy systems as they move away from ‘traditional’ fossil-fuel generation towards incorporating large volumes of ‘variable’ weather-dependent renewables. It has been incredibly exciting to work on developing the meteorological tools and understanding required to support this much-needed transition.”

Professor Bryan Lawrence was given The Award for Innovation in Development of Computational Models, Tools or Visualisation for making national and international contributions to the design, development, implementation, and governance of computational and data services for environmental science. He played a key role in the instigation and subsequent evolution of the JASMIN data analysis facility, which was set up to support the analysis of large archived datasets.

Professor Lawrence said: “Much of the motivation for JASMIN arose from the NERC DataGRid e-Science project, two learnings of which were that "my colleagues had big aspirations but were hamstrung by technology" and "sometimes distributed is not the rightanswer". So, this is an award for believing in my colleagues and (for once) being able to follow through a pathway to impact by operationalising some research outcomes.”

The Award for Outstanding Contribution to The Society or Profession was given to Dr Roger Brugge for his lifelong dedication to engaging in meteorological outreach in the local community, supporting amateur meteorological groups, and ensuring that long weather records from the University are accessible to a wider audience.

He said: “I was really surprised, and honoured, to receive this award from the RMetS. I developed an interest in the weather, and later meteorology in general, as a schoolboy running my own do-it-yourself back garden weather station in Manchester, partly inspired by a geography teacher who used to display the Daily Weather Report on his noticeboard.

“Making and using weather observations has always been a part of my life – maybe why I have always been keen to travel to schools with a car boot full of equipment to show how ‘things are done’ and to enthuse others. Little did I know when I first got interested in the weather, just how important the subject would become to everyone by the time I retired, after a research career in meteorology and oceanography, in 2022.”