August 10th, 2021
Honoring a distinguished career in atmospheric sciences, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) will present V. “Ram” Ramaswamy with the 2022 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal.
Ramaswamy has served as director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey since 2008.
Regarded as the highest award AMS offers, the medallion spotlights outstanding scientific contributions to the understanding of atmospheric behavior and structure, spanning back to the first recipient in 1951. Winners are nominated by their fellow AMS colleagues and peers.
According to AMS, Ramaswamy is being honored for his “original and highly influential leadership providing fundamental insight into radiative-climate interactions among greenhouse gases, aerosols and clouds.”
The 2022 AMS award recipients will receive their honor at the 102nd AMS Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas.
Ramaswamy is a central figure in climate science. From 1992 to 2021, he was Lead Author, Coordinating Lead Author, or Review Editor for each of the major assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. He was also a Coordinating Lead Author on the World Meteorological Organization assessments on stratospheric ozone and climate, and the first U.S. Climate Change Science Program (Global Change Research Program) assessment.
He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, as well as AMS, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He remains involved in the leadership of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Interagency Group on Integrative Modeling and has previously served on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Program.
The AMS medal is named for Carl-Gustaf Rossby, a pioneering scientist of meteorology and oceanography, who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics. Rossby served as AMS president from 1944 to 1945, and throughout his career he advanced the understanding of polar fronts on American weather. He developed mathematical descriptions of atmospheric dynamics and establish methods and models for numerical weather forecasting as large-scale computing came into use.
AMS is a community of weather, water, and climate scientists disseminating information about atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrologic research to ultimately advance society as a whole.