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CIRES Scientists win Gerbier-MUMM AwardJune 29, 2009 CIRES Fellow Balaji Rajagopalan was in Geneva earlier this month to receive the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award from the World Meteorological Organization. The Gerbier–MUMM Award was established to "reward an original scientific paper on the influence of meteorology in a particular field of the physical, natural or human sciences" or the influence of one of those sciences on meteorology. Along with former CIRES Fellow K. Krishna Kumar and on behalf of co-authors Martin Hoerling of NOAA, Mark Cane, and CIRES' Gary Bates, the WMO gave the award in recognition of the group's paper entitled, "Unraveling the mystery of Indian Monsoon failure during El Niño," which was published in the journal Science in 2006. They observed that over the historical rainfall record, severe droughts in India have always been accompanied by El Niño events, but that El Niño events did not always produce severe droughts. With the paper, they showed that the warmest sea surface temperature anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific are more likely to produce severe drought conditions in India than events with the warmest sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific -- findings that have important implications for monsoon forecasting. Rajagopalan is also an Associate Professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 
From left, HE M.A. Gopinathan, Ambassador of India; Alexander Bedritsky, President of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO); G. Guiard Gerbier; Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the WMO (back), CIRES Fellow Balaji Rajagopalan; and former CIRES Fellow K. Krishna Kumar. |
