Keith Raphael Briffa (27 December 1952 – 29 October 2017) was a climatologist and deputy director of the

Climatic Research Unit The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. With a staff of some thirty research scientists and s ...

. He authored or co-authored over 130 scholarly articles, chapters and books. In his professional work, he focused on

climate variability Climate variability includes all the variations in the climate that last longer than individual weather events, whereas the term climate change only refers to those variations that persist for a longer period of time, typically decades or more ...

in the late

Holocene The Holocene ( ) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 cal years Before Present (), after the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene togethe ...

, with a special focus on northern portions of

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

. Briffa's preferred method was

dendroclimatology Dendroclimatology is the science of determining past climates from trees (primarily properties of the annual tree rings). Tree rings are wider when conditions favor growth, narrower when times are difficult. Other properties of the annual rings, s ...

, which is a set of procedures intended to decode information about the past climate from

tree rings Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) is the scientific method of dating tree rings (also called growth rings) to the exact year they were formed. As well as dating them, this can give data for dendroclimatology, the study of climate and atmos ...

. Briffa helped develop data sets from trees from Canada,

Fennoscandia __NOTOC__ Fennoscandia (Finnish language, Finnish, Swedish language, Swedish and no, Fennoskandia, nocat=1; russian: Фенноскандия, Fennoskandiya) or the Fennoscandian Peninsula is the geographical peninsula in Europe, which includes ...

, and northern Siberia which have been used in climate research. Briffa grew up in

Speke Speke () is a suburb of Liverpool. It is southeast of the city centre. Located near the widest part of the River Mersey, it is bordered by the suburbs of Garston and Hunts Cross, and nearby to Halewood, Hale Village, and Widnes. The rural are ...

, and attended

St Francis Xavier's College, Liverpool {{Infobox school , name = St. Francis Xavier's College , image = St. Francis Xavier's College Crest.gif , image_size = , coordinates = {{coord, 53.382662, -2.880281, type:edu_ ...

. He studied biological sciences at the

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...

. He completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia entitled ''"Tree-climate relationships and dendroclimatological reconstruction in British Isles"'' in 1984. From 1994 to 2000, Briffa served on the scientific steering committee (SSC) of the PAGES project; more recently he also served on SSCs for the UK NERC Rapid Climate Change and the

European Science Foundation The European Science Foundation (ESF) is an association of 11 member organizations devoted to scientific research in 8 European countries. ESF is an independent, non-governmental, non-profit organisation that promotes the highest quality science ...

's HOLIVAR program. Briffa served as Lead Author on chapter 6 (Paleoclimatology) of working group I of the 2007

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report ''Climate Change 2007'', the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in 2007 and is the fourth in a series of reports intended to assess scientific, technical and socio ...

of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. Its job is to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) a ...

. Briffa previously served as associate editor of the scholarly journals ''

The Holocene ''The Holocene'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers research in the field of environmental studies, in particular environmental change over the last c. 11,500 years, particularly the interface between the long Quaternary record ...

'', ''Boreas'' and ''

Dendrochronologia ''Dendrochronologia'' is a peer-reviewed, international scholarly journal that presents high-quality research related to growth rings of woody plants, i.e., trees and shrubs, and the application of tree-ring studies. The areas covered by the jo ...

''. He had an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

of 81 according to

Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is an artificial intelligence–powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly released in November 2015. It uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries ...

Selected publications

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References

External links

Keith Briffa web page
1952 births 2017 deaths Alumni of the University of East Anglia Academics of the University of East Anglia Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead authors People educated at St Francis Xavier's College, Liverpool {{Climate-bio-stub