SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 2 - 4 may 2007
New Fellows Seminar
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
Dr John Finnigan
Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science
John Finnigan received his BSc from the University of Manchester in 1968 and his PhD from the Australian National University in 1978. From 1989 to 1995 he was Head of the CSIRO Centre for Environmental Mechanics, and a Chief Research Scientist at the CSIRO Divisions of Land and Water and, later, Marine and Atmospheric Research. Since 2001 he has been the Director of the CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science. He is heavily involved with the European and US programs on measuring the global carbon cycle and is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the international science program, Interactions between Land Ecosystems and Atmospheric Processes, an initiative of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. His research interests include atmospheric science, from detailed fluid dynamics to the role of biosphere-atmosphere exchange in climate dynamics, to complex systems science. In particular he is engaged in research on the ways that human decision making and societal dynamics can be captured quantitatively in models of the earth system.
Connecting the biosphere to the atmosphere
Growing concerns about climate change in the last three decades have forced a revolution in our understanding of the connections between the terrestrial biosphere and active constituents of the atmosphere such as greenhouse gases, water vapour aerosols, heat and momentum. Quantifying these connections in international Programs like the FLUXNET has stretched our knowledge of the way that atmospheric motion controls these exchanges. In his talk, John will show how the application of experiment and theory to living forest canopies at sites across the world have reshaped our understanding of the way that turbulent transport, vegetation and topography interact to modulate the breathing of the biosphere and illustrate the novel flow phenomena that have been revealed along the way.
