Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 November 2006
Organised by Professor David Beerling, Professor CN Hewitt, Professor John Pyle FRS and Professor John Raven FRS
Click here to view this event
Dr David Catling (Speaker)
David Catling completed his DPhil. in Atmospheric Physics at the University of Oxford in 1994. From 1995-2001, he was a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center in California. In 2001, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, jointly appointed to the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and cross-campus Astrobiology Program. His research interests include the coupled evolution of planetary surfaces and atmospheres, and involvement in exploration of Mars. He is currently Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington and, since 2005, European Union Marie Curie Chair in the Dept. of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
Professor Torben Christensen (Speaker)
Born 1966. PhD 1994, from Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, England. Since 2004 Professor at the GeoBiosphere Science Centre at Lund University Sweden. Currently (2004-2007) also part-time Professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences placed at the Abisko Scientific Research Station. His background is in environmental biology and Arctic biogeochemistry. His expertise is in Arctic and subarctic ecosystems, taiga and tundra. His research has focused on trace gas exchange the controlling variables, ground-based flux measurements (methane, carbon dioxide) and controlled environment studies. Keywords are carbon cycling response to climate change, climate feedbacks, vegetation changes and responses in ecosystem functioning in the past, current and as in future predictions. Within these research areas TRC has published 50+ original peer reviewed articles and book contributions during the past 14 years. Among many national and international board memberships he is co-chair of the Swedish National IGBP/WCRP Committee, member of the Scientific Steering Committee for IGBP-iLEAPS, member of Scientific Board for the Basic Ecological Research and Monitoring Programme at Zackenberg Research Station, NE Greenland and associate editor of Biogeochemistry.
Professor David Fowler CBE FRS (Speaker)
David Fowler is currently Science Director for Biogeochemistry at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh. In 1976, after gaining a BSc and PhD at the University of Nottingham, he went on to work at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (now formally known as CEH). He gained an Honorary Professorship at the University of Nottingham in 1991, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1999, and Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2002. He has been active in the Scottish Centre of the Royal Meteorological Society since joining in 1976, and was re-elected to the committee in 2004. He was elected Vice President for Scotland for the Royal Met Soc in 2006. His research interests are on surface atmosphere exchange processes, photochemical oxidants, acid deposition, emissions of greenhouse gases, atmospheric aerosols and effects of pollutants on vegetation. David has been a contributing author to more than 185 refereed publications in addition to contributions to book chapters and conference proceedings. In 2005 he was awarded the CBE for services to Atmospheric Sciences.
Professor Peter Liss (Speaker)
Peter Liss received his BSc in chemistry and physics from Durham University and his PhD in marine chemistry from the University of Wales. After holding a NERC Fellowship at Southampton University, he was appointed to the faculty of the newly established School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, where he has worked ever since.
His research has been in environmental chemistry, more particularly the air-sea exchange of a wide range of trace gases, and deposition of particulate material derived from land sources. This work has involved studies of biological and photochemical processes by which gases are formed in the oceans, the mechanisms and rates of their transfer across the air-sea interface, as well as the roles that they play on emission to the chemistry of the atmosphere. In addition, the roles that these transfers play in global climate regulation and human health have also been addressed, as has the importance of iron deposition in ocean biogeochemistry.
Professor Liss has worked at several laboratories abroad and is Guest Professor at the Ocean University of Qingdao, China. He is the recipient of the Challenger Society Medal and the Plymouth Marine Sciences Medal, and was Royal Society of Chemistry Environmental Chemistry Distinguished Lecturer in 2002 and the John Jeyes Medallist in 2003. He has served for 5 years on the Natural Environment Research Council, was Chair of the Scientific Committee of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, and was a member of the RAE Panel in Earth & Environmental Sciences in 1992 and 1996 and Chair in 2001. He will take up the Chair of the Royal Society's Global Environmental Research Committee in 2007.
Professor Barry Lomax (Speaker)
Professor Lomax's first degree was in Geology (Royal Holloway University of London), followed by a Masters of Research in Environmental Science (University College London) and a PhD (University of Sheffield) using plant fossils to reconstruct changes in the carbon cycle across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.
Professor Lomax has followed this with four years' post-doctoral experience (University of Sheffield); a Leverhulme Trust project testing the relationship between the origins and evolution of the first true leaves and atmospheric CO2 and a NERC-funded interdisplinary project to develop a new palaeo-proxy for assessing the flux of UV-B radiation reaching the Earth's surface over geological time. He is currently building on this work as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.
Professor Russell Monson (Speaker)
Russell Monson is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has developed research specialties in the area of plant ecology, including a particular focus on the emissions of volatile organic compounds from forests and their influence on atmospheric chemistry. Many of the chemical compounds produced by plants for the purposes of defense against herbivory and environmental stress are volatile and leak into the lower atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere, these chemicals are highly reactive with oxidative trace species and contribute to the production of ozone, organic nitrates, organic acids and aerosols. Future global change will have a profound influence on the emissions of these compounds and thus affect the chemistry of the troposphere.
Professor Monson received his degrees in the field of Botany and has been chosen as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Senior Fellow. He serves as Editor-in-Chief for the ecological journal, Oecologia. Professor Monson has been included as the senior author or co-author of over 130 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of plant ecology, ecosystem ecology, global change ecology and plant physiology and biochemistry.
Dr Colin O'Dowd (Speaker)
Colin O'Dowd is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Physics, National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). Previously, he was Professor of Physics at the University of Helsinki.
His research interests are in the field of aerosol-cloud interactions, impacts of aerosols and clouds on climate, remote sensing, aerosol formation and transformation. Studies range from in-situ field studies to process modelling to regional climate modelling and remote sensing of aerosol properties.
His is currently Joint Editor-in-Chief for JGR-Atmospheres, is a member of the AGU Atmospheric Science Executive Committee, and Chair of the American Geophysical Union, Atmospheric Science Technical Committee Aerosols and Clouds. He is also Co-Chair of the International Committee on Nucleation and Atmospheric Aerosols and ex-officio member of the International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation.
He received the Smoluchowsk Award 2004 for research into aerosol formation and transformation.
Dr Paul Palmer (Speaker)
Paul graduated in physics from the University of Bristol in 1995, and received his DPhil in physics from the University of Oxford in 1999. His doctoral thesis, funded by NERC and the UK Meteorological Office, showed the significant potential of space-borne radio occultation observations of Earth's atmospheric temperature and humidity retrieved from the Global Positioning System to improve weather prediction. After a short-term post-doctoral appointment looking at the role of tropical-temperature trough weather systems in controlling rainfall over southern Africa, Paul took up a research appointment at Harvard University in 1999 with Professor Daniel Jacob.
At Harvard, Paul cultivated his interests in satellite observations by retrieving and interpreting some of the first space-borne measurements of tropospheric chemistry, in collaboration with Drs Kelly Chance and Thomas Kurosu at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In particular, he pioneered the interpretation of satellite observations of formaldehyde (HCHO), a high yield oxidation product of volatile organic compounds (VOC). He developed an approach to estimate VOC emissions from the HCHO column data and showed that the seasonal and interannual variability of HCHO columns over North America during summertime could be explained by emissions of biogenic isoprene. Paul has since shifted his focus to developing a quantitative understanding of VOC fluxes from tropical ecosystems, which account for a large proportion of global biogenic VOC emissions but which are extremely uncertain in magnitude and distribution. His time at Harvard provided Paul with an interdisciplinary view of climate science, which continues to shape his research interests.
In 2005, Paul was appointed a University Research Fellow in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds. In 2006 he was awarded a new faculty fellowship to work with Drs Peter Harley and Alex Guenther at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he examined how plant VOC fluxes respond to ozone fumigation and how such biospheric processes could be parameterized for chemistry-climate models. He retains Visiting Scientist status at NCAR. In October 2006, Paul moved to the University of Edinburgh where he was appointed a lecturer in the School of GeoSciences. As part of an international consortium, Paul will be working in Borneo during 2008 to understand and quantify regional biogenic VOC emissions and the subsequent formation of organic aerosol, and how these affect regional atmospheric composition.
Professor Michael Prather (Speaker)
Michael J Prather is Professor and Kavli Chair in the Earth System Science Department at the University of California, Irvine. He spent 2005/2006 as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the US Department of State as an analyst on science and the environment. Prather received his PhD in astronomy from Yale University. His research interests include the simulation of the physical, chemical and biological processes that determine atmospheric composition and the development of (1) detailed numerical models of photochemistry and atmospheric radiation, and (2) global chemical transport models that describe ozone and other trace gases. Dr Prather has played a significant role in international assessments such as the IPCC 2nd and 3rd assessments, the special report on aviation, and the WMO's Ozone Assessments (1985-1994). He is a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Professor Keith Shine (Speaker)
Keith Shine was an undergraduate physicist at Imperial College London, followed by a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. After post-doctoral appointments at the Universities of Liverpool and Oxford, he moved to the University of Reading in 1988 where he is now Professor in Atmospheric Physics and was until recently the Head of the Department of Meteorology.
He was heavily involved in the early assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and similar international Scientific Assessments of Ozone Depletion. He specialises in the interaction of solar and infrared radiation with the Earth's atmosphere, and in particular the role that these mechanisms play in driving climate change.
Dr Eric Wolff (Speaker)
Dr Eric Wolff is a Principal Investigator at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), where he leads the programme "Climate and Chemistry". This programme studies past climate using Antarctic records, with a particular focus on ice cores. He chairs the science group of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), which has produced the longest records of climate and trace gases from ice cores, spanning some 800,000 years.
Professor James Zachos (Speaker)
James Zachos, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, investigates mechanisms responsible for driving long- and short-term changes in global climate. An oceanographer by training, Zachos measures the chemical composition of marine fossils to reconstruct changes in ocean temperatures, circulation, and productivity, as well as glacial ice volume and carbon cycling over the past 100 million years - and beyond. By understanding Earth's past climate record, scientists provide a comparative backdrop for historical, and possible future, global climate changes.
Zachos, author of 80 publications on climate change in Earth history, has sailed on 5 Ocean Drillng Program Legs including to the Arctic and Southern Ocean, and was co-chief scientist of Leg 208 to the south Atlantic. He has served on numerous national and international committees and advisory panels. He is currently a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR), Earth System Evolution Program, and the US Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group.