Dirmeyer Named Distinguished University Professor
AOES faculty member Paul Dirmeyer has been named Distinguished University Professor by George Mason University, joining AOES’s Jagadish Shukla and a small number of renowned professors at the university.
Dirmeyer’s specialty in climate dynamics is land-air interaction, a research area which he played a significant role in developing. Weather has been shown to be unpredictable beyond a few weeks, because even the smallest errors in the determination of the current weather will grow until they dominate predictions of future weather. However, Shukla, Dirmeyer, and their colleagues at George Mason’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA) have investigated how other components of the climate system can add predictability for longer periods because they evolve more slowly.
In particular, soil moisture plays a crucial role in future rainfall. Rainfall prediction is of intense interest to farmers, water resources managers, and others whose livelihoods (and sometimes lives) depend on accurate prediction of drought.
Dirmeyer’s leadership of the Global Land-Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (GLACE) has brought attention to special “hot spots” where soil moisture is especially significant for improving prediction of summertime precipitation. He launched the Global Soil Water Project (GSWP) and found that realistic estimates of soil moisture improved both rainfall and near-surface air temperature in weather models. Dr. Shukla notes that Dirmeyer’s work led to “perhaps one of the most important advancements in role of land in weather and seasonal prediction of the last 20 years.”
Paul Dirmeyer has published more than 200 papers with over 25,000 citations and an h-index of 79. He was editor of Journal for Advances in Modeling the Earth System (JAMES), one of the three highest impact journals of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He received the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award for early career scientists from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in 2006, and is a Fellow of both AGU and AMS. He is currently also an Affiliate Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Dirmeyer has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in AOES, developed (with colleague Tim DelSole) Mason’s innovative qualifying exam system, and mentored many of the 60+ Climate Dynamics doctoral students graduated by AOES.
