Peter Webster, professor and director of the CU-Boulder Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, has received a prestigious 2000 Fellowship award from the American Geophysical Union and the 2000 National Science Foundation Special Creativity Award.
AGU is an organization of international geophysical scientists that annually recognizes members who have made outstanding science and community contributions. The award -- given to no more than 0.1 percent of AGU's 35,000 members -- will be presented to Webster June 2 at the organization's honors ceremony held in Washington, D.C.
Roger Barry, an Arctic climatologist and director of the CU-Boulder-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, was awarded the 1999 Fellowship award.
Webster's AGU nomination and the $370,000 NSF award by the Atmospheric Research Division recognizes his outstanding research, teaching and service in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Webster, also a professor in astrophysics, planetary and atmospheric sciences at CU-Boulder since 1992, has worked on a number of significant international climate research projects.
Last year Webster directed an international research effort to study the South Asian summer monsoon in the Indian Ocean, which indicated there were ocean-atmosphere interactions similar to El Nino within that region. The Joint Air-Sea Monsoon Interaction Experiment, or JASMINE, is a joint venture of CU-Boulder, the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, NASA and several Australian agencies. Recently, he was awarded a $1.2 million grant from USAID to apply research on climate variability in the Indian Ocean to forecast major floods and droughts in the region such as the floods that devastate Bangladesh every few years and the cyclical drought and floods which plague East Africa.
Webster also co-directed the $50 million TOGA COARE research project to better understand ocean-atmosphere interactions in the tropical Pacific. He was honored by the American Meteorological Society in 1996 for his work on the project that involved more than 1,000 scientists, technicians and students from 20 countries during 1991 to 1994.
Webster previously received the NSF award in 1990 for his study on the physics of the monsoon and how it is related to phenomena such as El Nino.