Juliet Biggs will receive the 2017 Geodesy Section Award at the 2017 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 11–15 December in New Orleans, La. The award is given “in recognition of major advances in geodesy.”
CITATION
Juliet Biggs has made outstanding contributions to the field of satellite geodesy for understanding both active volcanism and faulting.
As a student, Juliet developed an innovative method for making interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations where the ground cover was nonideal. This allowed her to make unique observations of how strain was distributed in space and time before and after the 2002 Denali earthquake in Alaska.
During her postdoc, Juliet shifted her main focus to volcanic processes. Through systematic surveying of the world’s volcanoes, she discovered that several volcanoes in Kenya and Ethiopia, previously thought to be dormant, were actually undergoing episodes of deformation.
Juliet went on to examine the link between eruption and deformation from a global compilation of volcanoes, showing that very few eruptions occur without observable deformation. This work won her the Lloyd’s Science of Risk Prize in 2014 and led to the formation of the Global Deformation Database Task Force.
Juliet’s contributions to the field of geodesy go beyond measuring deformation with InSAR. She has developed methods for measuring rapid topographic changes at erupting volcanoes using radar, and methods to integrate a wide variety of other geodetic observations. She also recognizes that major advances require input from different disciplines and is currently co-leading a major project to understand volcanism in the Main Ethiopian Rift through the integration of geophysical, geological, and geochemical observations.
Juliet’s work has been, and continues to be, extremely influential internationally. Her research pushes the boundaries of our understanding of volcanic systems and delivers real-world benefits. I am thrilled that her achievements are being recognized with the 2017 AGU Geodesy Section Award.
—Andy Hooper, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K.RESPONSE
Many of the previous AGU Geodesy Section Award winners have been role models for me personally, and seeing my name among them is truly humbling. I am honored to receive this award and am especially grateful to Andy Hooper for his citation.
It is a privilege to work in a field that has applications across a broad spectrum of the Earth sciences yet retains its own identity and sense of society. The AGU Geodesy community has nurtured my career in many ways over the years; from invaluable feedback at poster sessions, to a student award in 2005, and to my first invited talk in 2008. From my early work on faults in the United States, to current projects on volcanoes in Africa and Latin America, geodesy has given me the opportunity to explore the world, a highlight of which is collaborating with scientists from a wide range of backgrounds and specialties.
In reality, this award is not an individual honor but a tribute to a number of colleagues, supervisors, and students who have inspired, advised, and supported me over the years. In particular, Tim Wright and Barry Parsons set me on a path of scientific curiosity, rigor, and integrity that I endeavor to follow to this day. At an early stage, Bramley Murton and Mark Simons somehow found time in their busy academic schedules to provide summer undergraduate research opportunities and opened my eyes to a whole new field. These days, I am enormously proud to work alongside some inspirational scientists—students, postdocs, and colleagues—who each bring their individual ideas, challenges, and rewards and ensure that no day is ever dull. My thanks go to all of you and to the countless others whose hard work behind the scenes makes all this possible.
—Juliet Biggs, University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K.
It is an honor to present Isaac Larsen as the recipient of the 2017 Luna B. Leopold Award. Isaac’s accomplishments span a ridiculously diverse array of basic and applied geomorphic problems, including postfire hydrology and erosion, landsliding and landscape evolution, soil production and weathering, and megaflood erosion. Consistent with Luna Leopold’s legacy and scientific approach, Isaac’s discoveries invariably incorporate fundamental observations that inform and advance theory on surface processes and landforms. During his Ph.D., Isaac incorporated landslides into an accounting of uplift and erosion in an active and well-studied region of the Himalayas. In the process, he mapped oodles of landslides and revisited how scaling relationships can be applied to soil and bedrock slope failures. His findings support the threshold slope conceptual model, a central theory of geomorphology that had never been definitively tested in a natural setting. Working in the Southern Alps in New Zealand, Isaac conducted several intense and physically demanding field campaigns to document remarkably rapid rates of soil production and weathering that challenge how we conceptualize feedbacks between physical and chemical denudation and critical zone evolution. For his postdoctoral research, Isaac considered how the Missoula Floods may have eroded iconic features like Moses Coulee. His calculations offer a mechanistic explanation for how progressive incision may be responsible for shaping portions of the Channeled Scablands, and this work motivates continued investigation of that remarkable landscape. In a relatively short amount of time, Isaac’s discoveries have established him as an intellectual leader in our field with skills for tackling problems relevant to human and geologic timescales, such as climate change, soil sustainability, and carbon cycling. His worthiness of the Leopold Award is unquestionable, and his contributions serve as inspiring examples of how process-based observations in geomorphology can be used to tackle big questions.
Given Grove Karl Gilbert’s legacy of high-caliber fieldwork, coupled to process-based studies, there can be few more deserving recipients of the G. K. Gilbert Award than Prof. Michael Church of the University of British Columbia. Primarily a field scientist, his extensive investigations on Baffin Island, his backbreaking work establishing necessary sampling criteria for gravel bar sedimentary studies, and other works on gravel bed river dynamics have been complemented by flume experimentation and computational studies on process dynamics.
Advances in computer modeling of cryospheric and polar systems are enabling our field to confidently predict past, present, and future conditions, thereby informing scientific studies, policy, and future planning. Jan Lenaerts’s meticulous, diligent, and diverse efforts in the field of modeling have led to major improvements in understanding the surface mass balance of ice sheets. Jan’s work has allowed complex and necessary processes to be implemented in models, including wind redistribution of snow, meltwater fluxes, cloud properties, and snow densification.
We are excited to announce our selection of Dr. Claudia Czimczik, an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), as the recipient of the 2017 Sulzman Award for Excellence in Education and Mentoring. The Sulzman Award is given annually for significant contributions as a role model and mentor for the next generation of biogeoscientists. Dr. Czimczik was selected because she is an accomplished researcher and an excellent mentor and educator to undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
Teruyuki (or Terry) has been a pioneer in developing cloud and aerosol remote sensing at visible and near-infrared wavelengths that is used today in satellites of the United States, Japan, and Europe, as well as airborne systems in several countries. He has been a powerful source of inspiration for many in the radiative transfer and remote sensing field. He is one of the founding members of AERONET, a worldwide network of Sun/sky radiometers for measuring aerosol optical and microphysical properties that is now distributed throughout the world (in more than 750 locations). He established the ground-based SKYNET observational network to measure and study aerosol trends in the East Asia corridor. He also led and directed numerous East Asian field campaigns to provide requisite data for validating and tuning aerosol chemistry transport models, and for documenting regional trends in aerosol variability, air pollution, and air quality. His forward and inversion radiation codes are widely used in the satellite, ground network, and modeling communities.
Dr. van der Wiel has distinguished herself by her ability to combine modeling with observations in new ways to explain various atmospheric phenomena. She began her career by studying the tropical dynamics related to the diagonal subtropical convergence zones of the Southern Hemisphere, developing a theory to explain why the South Pacific and Atlantic convergence zones are diagonal, the origin of their location and strength, and how they influence Rossby wave propagation. She then looked at extreme precipitation. She brought new insight into the fundamentals of our ability to model extreme precipitation in global climate models and how the field should interpret and test trends in observed and modeled precipitation extremes. She has brought an enthusiasm and creativity that is far beyond other scientists at a similar place in their careers. Her research has been picked up by the general press, and she has adeptly responded to their requests for information as well as to requests from governmental sources.
Dr. Peng is mainly known for his experimental work examining a wide variety of aerosol issues. At the time of his nomination, he had already written 20 peer-reviewed articles in high impact, top-tier journals. One important paper elucidates the formation mechanisms for haze in Beijing, China, via two distinct processes governed by meteorology. Another examines severe haze formation due to sulfur during the 1952 London fog events as well as in China. Probably his most influential work was explaining the rapid timescale of aging for black carbon, which, when implemented in climate studies, leads to an improved evaluation of the direct radiative forcing of black carbon, thereby closing the gap between model predictions and observations of the effect of black carbon aerosols on climate.
Rob Wood is a world recognized leader in the investigation of stratocumulus clouds, their interactions with aerosols, and their role in climate system. He first formulated the relationship between temperatures at 700 hPa and the surface (the “estimated inversion strength”) and cloud fraction, which is able to largely explain the regional and seasonal variations in stratus cloud amount. He found that cloud fraction is strongly linked with the LWP spatial variability at horizontal scales of 10–50 km, indicating the importance of organized mesoscale cellular convection (MCC) to understand and predict low cloud coverage and variability in the subtropics. He has linked the properties of MCC with precipitation, and with large-scale meteorological drivers, and connected the macrostructure of MCC with microphysical processes that under some circumstances can result in the catastrophic loss of aerosol particles, leading to transformations in MCC. He has also developed new and novel methods for the use of satellite data to understand mixing in clouds and enhance our understanding of the role of precipitation in the marine boundary layer. He has led, or has played leadership roles in a number of field experiments (VOCALS, CSET, and ORACLES, and the Eastern North Atlantic Measurement site on Graciosa Island in the Azores), that have led to immense advancements in our understanding of marine boundary-layer cloud systems, which play a critical role in the cloud feedback to climate change.
Gabe Vecchi has used his strong background in observational diagnostics, combined with excellent dynamical insights, to produce a number of key findings that have been highly cited in the literature. For example, in a 2006 Nature paper, he showed that observed changes in the Walker circulation could be attributed to human-induced climate change. In 2007, he also examined how changing large-scale climate affects vertical wind shear in the tropics, an issue of great relevance for tropical storms. He has also published a study on climate change and hurricanes. He examined how a changing observational network has significantly influenced our ability to quantify tropical storm changes over the past century. He extended this work to show how modern observing systems capture far more short-lived tropical systems, thus making the interpretation of longer-term trends more problematic. He has also led efforts to develop both dynamical and statistical models for seasonal hurricane prediction, with significant skill in predicting landfalls of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes.