Gabriele Messori
AS Atmospheric Sciences
The 2019 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Gabriele Messori for seminal contributions to the understanding of planetary wave-breaking phenomena, atmospheric extreme events and the energetics of the climate system using dynamical systems theory.
Gabriele Messori has rapidly established himself among the leading younger voices in the field of extreme events in the climate system. He has followed a wide variety of approaches, including physical process analysis, dynamical systems theory, machine learning and numerical modelling. His research has tackled two crucial challenges in contemporary climate science: namely to characterise the physical drivers of socio-economically important extreme events, and to enhance our ability to predict them. During his doctoral studies at Imperial College London, Messori found that the meridional atmospheric energy transport – a key component of the global climate system – is fundamentally sporadic in nature, and the net seasonal transport in the extratropics is set by a few extreme events every season. He then accepted a postdoctoral position at Stockholm University, where he broadened his outlook to include dynamical wave-breaking process; he showed among other things how large-scale Rossby waves help orchestrate simultaneous weather extremes in North America and Europe.
After a brief stint at the UK Met Office, Messori returned to Stockholm in 2016 and started working on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of weather extremes and identifying novel predictability pathways. Messori’s research now covers a very broad range of climate extremes, ranging from palaeoclimatic events to particulate matter concentration extremes in urban areas in both present and future climates to high-latitude temperature extremes. Only 4 years after his PhD., Messori has already published over 20 papers in a wide range of subjects covering atmospheric physics, statistics, dynamical systems theory, air quality, scientific communication and science policy. Despite his young age and relatively short research career, he is already building his independent research group in Uppsala University where he has recently started as Associate Professor. For these reasons, he is a worthy recipient of the AS Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award.