Ángel Francisco Adames is awarded the James R. Holton Award for his groundbreaking contributions to atmospheric sciences, in particular, to the theory of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO).
As the MJO slowly propagates from the tropical Indian Ocean to the Pacific, it influences global weather and climate, including many types of high-impact events, such as floods, wildfires, tropical cyclones, heat waves, cold surges, tornadoes, and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It has been a great challenge to explain the existence and slow propagation of the MJO. Adames was able to cleverly combine the moisture mode concept of the variability in the tropical atmosphere with the existing dry dynamic theory of equatorial waves and develop an elegant theory that not only explains the selection mechanism of the MJO’s temporal and spatial scales and its slow eastward propagation but also predicted a nonzero group velocity. Using this theory, he elucidated the observed 3-D wind and moisture structure of the MJO in an expansive series of papers.
In a pair of more recent papers, he addressed the question of how global warming would affect MJO behavior using a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies climate model. In further work, he has examined synoptic-scale monsoonal disturbances, showing how dry quasigeostrophic dynamics interacts with the time evolution of moisture (precipitation), explaining the propagation of moist static energy and its gentle ascent, and making the atmosphere more conducive to deep convection. His theoretical work on the monsoonal disturbances is the first that successfully combines the conventional potential vorticity thinking with the moisture dynamics of the monsoon.
As noted in Ángel’s nomination letter, “What is truly amazing about Ángel’s voluminous body of work is that it brings together all three ‘pillars’ of atmospheric research—theory, observation, and modeling—in such a synergistic way that they ‘amplify’ one another.” Few junior faculty and scientists have achieved so much at such an early stage of their careers.
On behalf of the AGU Atmospheric Sciences section, I am pleased to present the 2018 James R. Holton Award to Dr. Ángel F. Adames.
—Joyce E. Penner, President, Atmospheric Sciences Section, AGU