Flintshire Professor wins prestigious Royal Meteorological Society award

A Bangor University Professor from Northop has been awarded a top meteorological award for work which will help better understand marine turbulence and its impact on global climate.

Professor Tom Rippeth and his research team at Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences have been awarded The Royal Meteorological Society’s Vaisala Award for Weather Observing and Instrumentation.

Prof Rippeth is interested in how different water masses mix within our oceans and how the mixing of waters of different temperatures and salinity drives and affects global climate and weather patterns.

The Turbulence and Mixing research group at the University’s renowned School of Ocean Sciences have been responsible for a major advance in methods developed to measure the mixing or turbulence within the oceans over many decades.

They have greatly increased the capacity to make time series measurements, and through greatly reduced ship-time requirements, have cut the associated costs.

Prof Tom Rippeth said: “This new approach can be used wherever a vehicle can deploy and recover a mooring, and that includes most of the polar regions.  

As a result these measurements will help revolutionise understanding of marine turbulence and its impact on global climate.”

“For over two decades, the members of the Group have been leaders in marine turbulence measurement.

They follow in the footsteps of other leading academics in the field of oceanography over the past 50 years of marine sciences at Bangor University.”

The 2018 Vaisala Award was presented at the recent Royal Meteorological Society National Meeting and AGM