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by Valerie Shore
The efforts of a University of Victoria climatologist to understand the science of climate and weather—and communicate it to students, policy-makers and the general public—have won him a top provincial award.
Dr. Andrew Weaver, a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, has been named Academic of the Year by the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC (CUFA-BC). The annual award honours a faculty member at a BC university whose academic research or scholarly activity has had a significant impact on the wider community.
“Andrew is being recognized for his work in engaging the public on climate change issues, and for his efforts to make weather science more exciting and comprehensible to elementary and secondary school students,” says Robert Clift, executive director of CUFA-BC.
Weaver is one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis. Since he joined UVic in 1992, he and his research team have built one of the most sophisticated climate modelling facilities on the planet, featuring one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Although Weaver is barely in mid-career, he has authored or co-authored more than 170 peer-reviewed papers in climate, meteorology, oceanography, earth science, policy, anthropology and education journals. He is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Climate, considered the highest impact journal in the field.
A firm believer that public policy related to climate change be rooted in science, Weaver has served on many national and international committees. This February, he was one of 14 lead authors—and the only Canadian—of a key chapter on climate prediction in the fourth assessment of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In recent years, Weaver has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses, lectures and presentations to technical and non-technical audiences around the world. He is also a frequent media commentator and editorialist.
The CUFA-BC award recognizes in particular the network of solar-powered weather monitoring stations that Weaver and colleague Ed Wiebe have installed on the rooftops of more than 70 schools on southern Vancouver Island. The network, a partnership with several school districts, collects real-time weather information (available at www.victoriaweather.ca) and integrates it into the school curriculum.
“Physics and mathematics are often perceived as difficult and irrelevant,” says Weaver, who visits classrooms as often as he can. “What better way to demonstrate the relevance of science to kids than weather, something we see and feel every day?”
Weaver is the fifth UVic faculty member to be named Academic of the Year since the award was created in 1995. Previous winners were Nigel Livingston, director of the University of Victoria Assistive Technology Team (2005), environmental studies professor Nancy Turner (2002), chemist Reg Mitchell (2000), and child and youth care professor Sibylle Artz (1998).
CUFA/BC represents approximately 4,200 university professors, instructors, academic librarians and other academic staff at five BC universities.
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