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The Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Annual Awards Ceremony

The Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) held its annual awards ceremony on June 9, 2021 and members of the Department of Physics were honoured.

CMOS President’s Prize

Awarded to Debra Wunch for her 2017 paper “Comparisons of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) XCO2 measurements with TCCON", published in the Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. Dr. Wunch’s paper was a data-evaluation technical tour-de-force, with 45 scientists from 19 institutions around the world, allowing for the measurement of CO2 from the OCO-2 satellite with sufficient precision and accuracy to unlock our understanding of greenhouse gas emission sources and natural sinks.

CMOS Tertia MC Hughes Memorial Graduate Student Prize

Awarded to Kristof Bognar for his excellent thesis titled “Studies of Stratospheric and Tropospheric Ozone, NO2, and BrO Using UV-Visible Spectroscopy in the Arctic and at Mid-latitudes”.(Kristof was a PhD student in my group, who recently graduated) and to Jesse Velay-Vitow for his outstanding productivity, outreach and leadership during his first two years of PhD studies in atmospheric physics. (Jesse is a PhD student in Dick Peltier's group)

CMOS Roger Daley Post-Doctoral Publication Award

Awarded to Russell Blackport for his recent paper “Minimal influence of reduced Arctic sea ice on coincident cold winters in mid-latitudes” published in Nature Climate Change in 2019. While recent severe winters over North America and Eurasia are still puzzling climate scientists, this paper uses a simple yet powerful physics-based approach to demonstrate that record-low Arctic sea ice coverage was not the root cause. (Russell is a former PhD student who was in Paul Kushner's group)

Also at the CMOS ceremony, Paul Kushner was formally awarded the 2019 Patterson Medal Award for Distinguished Service to Meteorology in Canada by the ADM of the Meteorological Service of Canada, as previously announced (https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/news-and-events/news/physics-news/paul-kushner-awarded-patterson-medal-for-distinguished-service-to-meteorology-in-canada/).

CMOS Fellow

At the CMOS Annual General Meeting on June 22, it was announced that Kimberly Strong has been appointed as a Fellow of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society "for outstanding research in studies of atmospheric composition relevant to climate and pollution, for major contributions to leadership and mentoring, and for longstanding contributions to CMOS, including as its President."

More information on CMOS can be found here:
https://www.cmos.ca/site/about/cmos?nav=sidebar