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Press Release No. 851

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DR EUGENIA KALNAY WINS 54th IMO PRIZE

Geneva, 11 June 2009 (WMO) – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is awarding its most prestigious Prize and honouring several distinguished scientists with other awards this week at the annual meeting of the Executive Council.  These scientists have made outstanding contributions leveling the field of meteorology, climatology, hydrology and related.

At each of its annual sessions, the WMO Executive Council confers awards and prizes for contributions to the advancement of meteorology, climatology and hydrology, as well as encouraging young scientists active in those fields. These prizes include the IMO Prize, the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award and the WMO Research Award for Young Scientists.

The IMO Prize, the highest WMO award, originates from WMO's predecessor, the International Meteorological Organization (IMO), founded in 1873. 54th IMO Prize laureate is Dr Eugenia Kalnay (Argentina/United States of America), who is leader in the field of global numerical weather prediction and analysis, including data assimilation and ensemble forecasting. She has been involved in several international WMO activities, including the WMO/Thorpex Workshop on 4D-Var and Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) Inter-comparisons held in 2008.

Dr Kalnay was the first woman to obtain a doctorate from the MIT Department of Meteorology (1971), and the first female professor at the MIT Department of Meteorology.

The Council conferred the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award for 2010 on the paper entitled “Monitoring Daily Evapotranspiration at a Regional Scale from Landsat-TM and ETM+ data: Application to the Basilicata Region”, published in the Journal of Hydrology in 2008 by J.M. Sánchez, G. Scavone, V. Caselles, E. Valor, V.A. Copertino and V. Telesa. Lead author J.M. Sánchez, as well as V. Caselles and E. Valor, are from the Earth Physics and Thermodynamics Department, Faculty of Physics at the University of Valencia, Spain.  The other authors are with the Department of Engineering and Environmental Physics of the University of Basilicata, Portenza, Italy. The paper sheds light on water cycle processes using satellite data.

WMO awarded its 2009 Research Award for Young Scientists to Alex J. Cannon from Canada, for the paper “Probabilistic multi-site precipitation downscaling by an expanded Bernoulli-gamma density network,” published in the December 2008 issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology. Demonstrated on a dataset from coastal British Columbia, Canada, the study explored the capability to analyze several facets of precipitation distribution, including predicting precipitation amounts in excess of those in the observational record

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For more information please contact:

At WMO:

Ms Carine Richard-Van Maele, Chief, Tel: +41 (0) 22 730 8314, E-mail:  cvanmaele(at)wmo.int

Ms Gaëlle Sévenier, Press Officer, Tel. +41 (0) 22 730 8417. E-mail: gsevenier(at)wmo.int;

Ms Lisa Muñoz, Press Officer Tel. +41 (0) 22 730 8213. E-mail: lmunoz(at)wmo.int

Web site: www.wmo.int

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