The Wagner Award presentation will be held Friday, January 11 at noon in the Stout Conference Room at DRI in Reno.

“We are pleased to give this award to one of the truly outstanding young scientists in the nation,” said Stephen Wells, DRI President. “Her work is both innovative and important. The importance of addressing global climate change cannot be overstated.”

In her paper she studied the year-to-year variations in uptake of carbon dioxide and oxygen by the Southern Ocean. The exchange of soluble gases between the atmosphere and the ocean is controlled by physical and biogeochemical processes, which in turn are influenced by changes in the local climate. The goal of the study was to quantify the variability of air-sea gas exchange and to identify the processes that are most important in generating that variability.

“The complex interactions between the atmospheric, oceanic, and biogeochemical components of the Earth system are a fascinating topic to study,” Ariane Verdy said. “The Southern Ocean region is particularly interesting because it plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle.”

Understanding the dynamical processes controlling air-sea fluxes is an important step toward predicting how the global carbon cycle will respond to future climate change.

Verdy studied physics engineering at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada, and physical oceanography at MIT and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She received her PhD from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in November 2007. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Earth System Initiative at MIT.

The winner of the Peter B. Wagner Memorial Award for Women in Atmospheric Sciences competition receives $1,500 and is awarded to a woman pursuing a Masters or PhD in atmospheric sciences or a related program at a university in the United States.

# # #

All DRI news releases available at: http://news.dri.edu/

Note to Reporters and Editors: DRI, the nonprofit research campus of the Nevada System of Higher Education, strives to be the world leader in environmental sciences through the application of knowledge and technologies to improve people’s lives throughout Nevada and the world.