12
BAMOS
Dec 2017
News
Council for those periods that he was Perth Centre Chair. He was Chair of the
Organising Committee for the only AMOS Annual Conference held in Perth. He
has been a member of the AMOS Awards Committee for some 13 years. He also
chairs one of the four Awards Selection Sub-Committees. Mervyn has been the
principal supervisor for 35 completed PhD and MSc students, co-supervisor for
many more, and undergraduate supervisor for some 70 students working on
remote sensing projects.
Dr Blair Trewin
Blair Trewin. Image: Bureau of
Meteorology.
Blair developed the Bureau’s homogenised (ie quality controlled and bias
corrected) long-term Australian temperature dataset known as the “Australian
Climate Observational Research Network – Surface Air Temperature” (ACORN-
SAT). He has also made substantial contributions to other homogenised
datasets including the high-quality Australian evaporation, cloudiness, and
tropical cyclone datasets, and the rainfall (ACORN-Rain) dataset which is
currently in development. These data collectively form the basis for much of our
understanding of long-term climate variability and change over Australia. He also
produced a compendium of national and state rainfall and temperature records
for Australia, which became the official Bureau list of extremes. Internationally
he is a member of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s Task Team on
Homogenization, and a former member of the Expert Team on Climate Change
Detection and Indices (2006–2014) and Task Team on Definitions of Extreme
Weather and Climate Events. He was a lead author of several WMO Annual
Climate Reports and the lead author of the 2016 WMO Report on the Climate of
the previous five years. Blair is arguably Australia’s most prominent public climate
commentator of the past decade. He has published more than 20 articles in The
Conversation, and typically conducts in excess of 100 media interviews a year.
Blair has dedicated countless hours t owards AMOS, as AMOS president (2012–
2014) and honorary treasurer (2002–2007), and contributes the long series of
“Charts from the Past” for the AMOS Bulletin (see page 39). He was the editor of
the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal from 2006–2016.