Prof. Richard Washington
Prof. Richard Washington
Prof. Richard Washington is Professor of Climate Science at the School of Geography and the Environment and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. His specializes in African climate science. He has degrees from the University of Natal and University of Oxford and taught at the University of Natal and University of Cape Town. His doctorate was on African rainfall variability and change, which was undertaken jointly between the University of Oxford under Professor Alayne Street-Perrott and Chris Folland’s group at the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office. He took up a University Lectureship position and Fellowship at Keble College in 1999, a Readership in 2006 and was made professor in 2010.
Richard is Co-Chair World Climate Research Program African Climate Variability Panel (CLIVAR-VACS) 2006-2010 and served as a panel member of CLIVAR-VACS from 2003-2006. Richard leads the development of the CLIVAR Africa Climate Atlas. He is Principal Investigator of the NERC Consortium Fennec – The Saharan Climate System and Principal Investigator of the NERC research grant Dust Observations for Models. He serves on the steering committee and on the Project Assurance Team of the Met Office-DFID Climate Science Research Partnership He is the Lead author of DFID and Defra commissioned ‘African Climate Report’ for the Gleaneagles 2005 G8 and has been a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change chapters on Observed Climate and Africa for the 2007 and 2001 reports. He was a member of the eight-strong Leadership Group tasked with the development of the Climate Change Challenge Program, a joint multi-million dollar proposal between ESSP and CGIAR entitled Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.
He has served as the World Climate Research Program representative to the International Council for Science southern Africa as well as membership of several external steering committees including AFRICANNESS (African Earth System Science) and the Stockholm Environment Institute-Oxford. He was one of 12 members of the NERC Climate Science Strategy Panel for the forthcoming 2007-2012 NERC Science Strategy. He has taught on several World Climate Program “Climate Information and Prediction Services (CLIPS)” Workshops, including Nairobi, Niamey, Dar Es Salaam, Qatar and, most recently, in Tunis. He has served on the panel of judges for the Best Research Paper (SA Society for Atmospheric Scientists) from 2003-2009.
His research efforts and opinions have been reported in:
- Nature, 434: p816-819 (14 Apr 2005) Bodélé Dust Experiment.
- Nature, 444: p126 (9 Nov 2006) Bodélé Dust Transport to Amazon.
- Nature, 435, p862-863 (16 June 2005) African Climate and G8.
Science, 313, p608-609 (4 August 2006) African Monsoon
