American climate scientist and National Medal of Science recipient Warren M. Washington is a guest speaker in the 2013-2014 John R. and Donna S. Hall Engineering Lecture Series at Vanderbilt University.
The lecture – The Development of Computer Earth System Models: Climate Change in the 20th and 21st Century – is Thursday, March 27, at 4:10 p.m. in Jacobs Believed in Me Auditorium in Featheringill Hall. A reception will follow.
Washington is a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and he serves as chair of the National Research Council’s Review Committee for the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Washington has had presidential appointments during the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, Jr. administrations. In November 2010, President Obama awarded Washington the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest science award.
“Better climate and earth system models make 21st century assessments of national and global environmental changes even more useful for vulnerability, mitigation and adaptation studies of future climate change,” said Washington, whose group at NCAR uses state-of-the-art computer climate models to study present and future climate change.
In this lecture Washington will explain how climate research pioneers unraveled the fundamentals of how Earth’s climate system works, and the substantial progress on these early models in the past half century. He also will present examples of future improvements to observational and model studies that will provide new knowledge, which will make global climate change information more useful for the public and policymakers.
Washington has authored more than 150 publications and co-authored with Claire Parkinson a book considered a standard reference on climate modeling.
He served from 1994 to 2006 on the National Science Board that governs the National Science Foundation, and he was chair from 2002 to 2006. Washington is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, past President of the American Meteorological Society (1994), a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Philosophical Society, American Geophysical Union; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Washington earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in meteorology from Oregon State University, and his doctorate in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University.
Live video of this event will be streamed on Vanderbilt News (at http://news.vanderbilt.edu). Archived video will be available for viewing after March 31.
Established in 2002, the John R. and Donna S. Hall Engineering Lecture Series allows Vanderbilt engineering students to hear renowned engineers from universities and agencies address engineering topics of particular interest.