Joern Callies and Jill McDermott win Carl-Gustaf Rossby Awards for PhD theses
Joern Callies PhD '16 and Jill McDermott PhD '15 were recently honored with the the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Award, given for the best PhD thesis completed within MIT's Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate (PAOC). As a major figure in the founding of the modern dynamical study of the atmosphere and ocean, Professor Carl-Gustaf Rossby’s name is recalled ubiquitously in the fields of Earth and planetary sciences. Rossby waves, the Rossby number, and the Rossby radius of deformation are ideas fundamental to the understanding of all fluid behaviors on a global scale. These insights into the large-scale air movement and mathematical descriptions of atmospheric and oceanic motion are among the reasons that Rossby is credited with the development of modern meteorology. Further, it was at MIT that Rossby honed much of this work. After being appointed to the faculty in the Department of Aeronautics in 1928, Rossby founded the study of meteorology and physical oceanography...