Trevor McDougall

Trevor John McDougall AC FRS FAA FAGU FInstP FRSN is a physical oceanographer specialising in ocean mixing and the thermodynamics of seawater. He is Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.[1][3] He is President of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO)[4] of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.

Trevor McDougall

AC FRS FAA FAGU FInstP FRSN
Born
Trevor John McDougall

(1952-07-01) 1 July 1952[1]
Adelaide
EducationUnley High School[1]
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsUniversity of New South Wales
Doctoral advisors

Education

After attending Unley High School in Adelaide, South Australia, McDougall went to St Mark's College (University of Adelaide) and graduated from the University of Adelaide in Mechanical Engineering in 1973.[1] He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in 1978 from the University of Cambridge[1] and a Graduate Diploma in Economics from the Australian National University in 1982.[1]

Research and career

McDougall undertook his PhD studies in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and St John's College Cambridge of the University of Cambridge where he was supervised by Professors Stewart Turner and Paul Linden. In 1978 he returned to Australia on a Queen's Fellowship in Marine Science at the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University (ANU).[1] After five years at ANU he was appointed to CSIRO in Hobart as a physical oceanographer.[1] Since 2012 he has been Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.[1]

McDougall's research in physical oceanography has provided insight to how seawater mixes under different conditions, which is important for understanding climate change.[3] The ocean and the atmosphere play roughly equal roles in transporting heat from the equatorial region to the poles, and McDougall's research is concerned with how the ocean reduces the equator-to-pole temperature differences, thus making Earth habitable.

McDougall is known for developing, together with David Jackett, an algorithm for defining neutral density surfaces. These are the surfaces along which swirling ocean eddies — that are 10–500 kilometres wide and persist for many months — mix. The rate of turbulent mixing in the ocean is a factor of ten million times stronger along "density" surfaces than in the direction across these surfaces.[3][5] The accurate modelling of the ocean’s role in climate relies on being able to accurately define and evaluate these surfaces.[5] McDougall has also made significant contributions to incorporating the concepts of mixing and heat into ocean models.[3][6]

He is President of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO)[4] of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. He chaired the working group of SCOR and IAPSO that developed the international standard definitions of seawater, humid air, and ice, which were adopted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 2009.[1][7]

Awards and honours

McDougall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He is also a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (1997), the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (2004), the Institute of Physics (2012), the Royal Society of New South Wales (2015),[1] and the American Geophysical Union (2018).[8] His other awards include:

References
  1. "McDougall, Prof. Trevor John". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com (online ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. 2017. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.256695. (subscription or UK public library membership required) (subscription required)
  2. Smith, Deborah (23 June 2015). "Three scientists awarded Laureate Fellowships". University of New South Wales. Retrieved 3 May 2020.
  3. "Trevor McDougall". London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 2017-07-10. Retrieved 2016-03-09.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), "Intellectual property rights"
  4. "Bureau and Executive Committee of IAPSO". iapso.iugg.org.
  5. Jackett, David R.; McDougall, Trevor J. (1997). "A Neutral Density Variable for the World's Oceans". Journal of Physical Oceanography. American Meteorological Society. 27 (2): 237–263. doi:10.1175/1520-0485(1997)027<0237:andvft>2.0.co;2. ISSN 0022-3670.
  6. McDougall, Trevor J.; McIntosh, Peter C. (2001). "The temporal-residual-mean velocity. Part II: Isopycnal interpretation and the tracer and momentum equations". Journal of Physical Oceanography. American Meteorological Society. 31 (5): 1222–1246. doi:10.1175/1520-0485(2001)031<1222:TTRMVP>2.0.CO;2. ISSN 0022-3670.
  7. "Thermodynamic Equation of SeaWater TEOS-10". www.teos-10.org.
  8. "2018 AGU Fellows announced". eos.org/agu-news/2018-class-of-agu-fellows-announced.
  9. "Meet the recipients of the January 2018 Australia Day Honours". ABC. Retrieved 2018-01-26.
  10. "2017 NSW Premiers prize winners".
  11. It's an Honour, Centenary Medal, 1 January 2001, Citation: For service to Australian society and science in marine science.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.