Victor Fomitchev and Marianna Shepherd, adjunct faculty members in the Centre for Research on Earth & Space Science (CRESS) in York's Faculty of Science & Engineering, have received the World Meteorological Organization’s Norbert Gerbier Mumm International Award for 2005.
This annual award recognizes an original scientific paper on the influence of meteorology in a particular field of the physical, natural or human sciences, or on the influence of one of these sciences on meteorology. For 2005 the award was given to a paper titled ,"Review of Mesospheric Temperature Trends", for which the lead author was Gufran Beig, of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India, with 18 co-authors, including Fomitchev and Shepherd. The authors came from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the USA.
The paper, published in Reviews of Geophysics in 2003, showed that global change in the upper atmosphere is a fact, and not just a possibility. Beig said that the project, which had been in progress for five years, provided the first comprehensive review of the long-term trends in the atmosphere (from 50 to 100 km), on the basis of data available.
The review takes into account the global temperature records for the past three decades and the weather and temperature models. The paper illustrated that the temperature in the ionosphere had decreased by about 15 degrees Celsius over the past 30 years. Shepherd and Fomitchev provided observational and model results to this investigation.