Trevor McDougall

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Trevor McDougall

AC FRS FAA FAGU FInstP FRSN
Trevor-McDougall.jpg
Born
Trevor John McDougall

(1952-07-01) 1 July 1952 (age 71) [1]
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Education Unley High School [1]
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions University of New South Wales
Doctoral advisors

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

Contents

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 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 was president of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) [4] of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 2019-2023 and is past president for 2023-2027. He chaired the working group of SCOR and IAPSO that developed the international standard definitions of the thermodynamic properties of seawater, humid air, and ice (TEOS-10, Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater - 2010), 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 CSIRO (2007), the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (2004), the Institute of Physics (UK) (2012), the Royal Society of New South Wales (2015), [8] the American Geophysical Union (2018), [9] and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (2023). His other awards include:

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 "McDougall, Prof. Trevor John" . Who's Who (online ed.). A & C Black. 2017. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.256695 . Retrieved 19 January 2018.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. 1 2 Smith, Deborah (23 June 2015). "Three scientists awarded Laureate Fellowships". University of New South Wales . Retrieved 3 May 2020.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "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 10 July 2017. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), "Intellectual property rights"
  4. 1 2 "Bureau and Executive Committee of IAPSO". iapso-ocean.org.
  5. 1 2 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. Bibcode:1997JPO....27..237J. 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. Bibcode:2001JPO....31.1222M. 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. ↑ "Fellows of the Royal Society of New South Wales". 16 December 2022.
  9. ↑ "2018 AGU Fellows announced". eos.org/agu-news/2018-class-of-agu-fellows-announced. 9 August 2018.
  10. ↑ Lu, Donna (21 November 2022). "Trevor McDougall wins $250,000 science prize for researching 'thermal flywheel' of climate system". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 November 2022.
  11. ↑ "What's the Ocean got to do with Climate Change?", a Public Lecture on 29 June 2023 at the University of New South Wales, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJXmTEw3Opg
  12. ↑ "Meet the recipients of the January 2018 Australia Day Honours". ABC. Retrieved 26 January 2018.
  13. ↑ "recipients of NSW Premier's Prize". 16 December 2022.
  14. ↑ "recipients of Jaeger Medal". 16 December 2022.
  15. ↑ "Houghton Fund MIT". 16 December 2022.
  16. ↑ It's an Honour, Centenary Medal, 1 January 2001, Citation: For service to Australian society and science in marine science.
  17. ↑ "Past Recipients".
  18. ↑ "Sir Albert Cherbury David Rivett [1885-1961]". 13 January 2015.
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