UVic Climate Researcher Wins Killam Fellowship

UVic climate researcher Dr. Andrew Weaver is one of 17 Canadian researchers to win a prestigious Killam Research Fellowship for 2002.

Administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, the fellowships support distinguished scholars engaged in research projects "of outstanding merit" in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, engineering, or interdisiplinary studies within these fields.

The award provides UVic with the funds to release Weaver from teaching duties for two years so that he can concentrate full-time on research. The fellowship term begins in September.

Weaver, 40, is one of the world's leading researchers in the area of climate dynamics, especially in the development and use of coupled ocean-atmosphere models. For his Killam project, he will investigate the interaction of vegetation and carbon cycles in global climate change over the last 400,000 years.

"Plants on land and in the ocean respond to climate change in terms of their sequestering ability and their release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," he explains.

Weaver and colleagues have developed the Earth System Climate Model, comprising sophisticated ocean, sea ice and land ice components. Over the next two years, Weaver will develop a new, more powerful version of the model that will take into account the influence of vegetation on land -- and phytoplankton in the ocean -- on climate variability.

"We're trying to develop an understanding of the role of carbon cycles via plants," he says. "The idea is that we can test all this with past climates with the goal of looking at future climates."

The Killam fellowship is the latest in a growing list of prestigious honours for Weaver. In 1997-99 he held a two-year Steacie Research Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. In December 2000 he was awarded UVic's first Canada Research Chair, worth $200,000 a year and renewable for seven years. And last June he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the country's premier academic organization.

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