It has been raining awards since the new Extreme Rainfall research program began. Most recently, Jason Evans and Julie Arblaster were co-winners of the AMOS Priestley Medal and Christian Jakob was made an AMOS Fellow.

Across in Europe, Partner Investigator Sandrine Bony at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace was awarded the Gérard Mégie Prize by the French Academy of Sciences.

Associate Investigator Markus Donat was announced as the winner of the 2017 WCRP/GCOS International Data Prize. The prize committee said it “was greatly impressed by his strong profile and the outstanding quality of his contribution to the development of climate data sets“.

We are also pleased to see that Associate Investigators Alejandro de Luca and Sophie Lewis have been named as Lead Authors on the next IPCC report, AR6, for Working Group 1.

The Research Program has also started bringing the community together. In February and March of this year Associate Investigator Martin Singh organised the UMAP (Understanding and Modelling Atmospheric Processes) Pan-GASS conference, with sponsorship from ARCCSS. The meeting was well attended by CLEX Extreme Rainfall researchers, and provided an opportunity to meet with many of our PIs and partner organizations. These meetings included a side meeting organized by the UKMO on model physics developments.

Recruitment for the Research Program is close to finalised with postdocs Martin Bergemann, Malcolm King, and Sugata Narsey in place and Margot Bador to start later in the year. Claire Vincent also commenced her Lectureship, which is co-funded by CLEX. Our new PhD and MSc students are all settling in. We’ve also had a number of recent visitors, including Gretchen Mullendore (University of North Dakota) who is on sabbatical from February to April, Wojciech Grabowski (NCAR PI) who visited for a week in March, as well as many shorter visits from UKMO scientists.

As a result, using new radar data our research has commenced in earnest with investigations of the processes and large-scale conditions controlling extreme rainfall over Darwin. We are also celebrating the news of the successful proposal, which many of us contributed to, for time on the RV Investigator to study convective processes during the Years of the Maritime Continent (YMC) international field experiment in late 2019.

 

Papers