Michael Lockwood
FRS (born 1954) is a Professor of Space Environment Physics at the
University of Reading.
Life and works
Schooled at
The Skinners' School,
Tunbridge Wells, he earned his BSc (1975) and then PhD (1978) degrees at the
University of Exeter. Much of his career has been with
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It began as the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, merged with the Atlas ...
but he has also worked at
University of Southampton,
NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center
The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), located in Redstone Arsenal, Alabama (Huntsville postal address), is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. As the largest NASA center, MSFC's first ...
and
University of Auckland. His research interests comprise, among others, variations in the magnetic fields of the Sun, interplanetary space, and the Earth and in general solar influence on global and regional climate. He has served as the Chair of the Council of
EISCAT
EISCAT (European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association) operates three incoherent scatter radar systems in Northern Scandinavia and Svalbard. The facilities are used to study the interaction between the Sun and the Earth as revealed by dist ...
and as a Council member for the British
Natural Environment Research Council.
His lectures, at the
Saas-Fee Advanced Course ''The Sun, Solar Analogs and the Climate'', together with contributions of such experts as
Joanna Haigh
Joanna Dorothy Haigh (born 7 May 1954) is a British physicist and academic. Before her retirement in 2019 she was Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London, and co-director of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and En ...
and Mark Giampapa, were published as a book by
Springer in 2006.
He played football during his postdoctoral studies in a team called the Merry Pranksters of Exeter University. He plays guitar for the band Dumber than Chickens.
Positions on solar influence on global and regional climate
In 2007, Lockwood co-authored a paper about solar data from the past 40 years.
[ He was partly inspired to conduct the study after seeing ]the Great Global Warming Swindle
''The Great Global Warming Swindle'' is a 2007 British polemical documentary film directed by Martin Durkin. The film denies the scientific consensus about the reality and causes of climate change, justifying this by suggesting that climatolo ...
, which contends that the Sun is the primary cause of recent climate change. He found that between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could affect climate performed an "U-turn in every possible way".[ Lockwood told the New Scientist that he seriously doubted that solar influences were a big factor compared to anthropogenic influences: to explain the lack of global cooling since 1987 would require a very long response time to any solar forcing which is not found in detected responses to volcanic forcing.]
However, Lockwood has stressed the distinction between global, regional and seasonal climate changes and is of the opinion that solar modulation of the winter, northern hemisphere jet stream
Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering thermal wind, air currents in the Atmosphere of Earth, atmospheres of some planets, including Earth. On Earth, the main jet streams are located near the altitude of the tropopause and are west ...
might well result in Europe experiencing a higher fraction of cold winters.[ From past variations of the Sun deduced from cosmogenic isotopes he concludes that a slide into a new Maunder Minimum is possible over the next 50–100 years.][ The biggest impact of such a decline in solar activity would be a higher occurrence frequency of relatively cold winters in the UK and across Europe, each of which would be accompanied by a relatively warm one elsewhere (for example in Greenland).][Solar Activity and the so-called “Little Ice Age”]
, Carbon brief blog, 1 November 2013, Mike Lockwood[Is our Sun falling silent?]
Rebecca Morelle
Rebecca Sabrina Morelle (born 8 December 1978) is a British science journalist, currently global science correspondent for BBC News.
Early life
She attended Goffs School (now Goffs Academy) in Cheshunt in Borough of Broxbourne, south-east Hertfor ...
, BBC World Service 18 January 2014
In 2012, Lockwood said the field of Sun-climate relations had been "corrupted by unwelcome political and financial influence as climate change sceptics
Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is Denial (Freud), denial, dismissal, or doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change, including the extent to which it is Attribution of recent climate change, caused by hum ...
have seized upon putative solar effects as an excuse for inaction on anthropogenic warming".
Awards
* 1990 The Zel'dovich
Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich ( be, Я́каў Бары́савіч Зяльдо́віч, russian: Я́ков Бори́сович Зельдо́вич; 8 March 1914 – 2 December 1987), also known as YaB, was a leading Soviet physicist of Bel ...
Award for Commission C (Ionospheric Physics), awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), of the International Council of Scientific Unions
The International Council for Science (ICSU, after its former name, International Council of Scientific Unions) was an international non-governmental organization devoted to international cooperation in the advancement of science. Its members ...
* 1990 The Issac Koga was an inventor and scientist.
Early life and education
He was the eldest of seven children born in Tashiro Village (now Tosu), Saga Prefecture. In July 1920, at the age of 20, he started to study at the Department of Electrical Engineering a ...
Gold Medal, awarded by the International Union of Radio Science
The International Union of Radio Science (abbreviated ''URSI'', after its French name, french: link=no, Union radio-scientifique internationale) is one of 26 international scientific unions affiliated to the International Council for Science ( ...
(URSI)
* 1998 The Chapman Medal
The Chapman Medal is an award of the Royal Astronomical Society, given for "investigations of outstanding merit in the science of the Sun, space and planetary environments or solar-terrestrial physics". It is named after Sydney Chapman (1888 ...
, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, London
* 2003 The Charles Chree (now renamed the Appleton) Award and Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics, London
* 2006 Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London
* 2012 The Julius Bartels
Julius Bartels (17 August 1899, Magdeburg – 6 March 1964) was a German geophysicist and statistician who made notable contributions to the physics of the Sun and Moon; to geomagnetism and meteorology; and to the physics of the ionosphere. He al ...
Medal, awarded by the European Geosciences Union
* 2015 The Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for Geophysics
Works
* M. Lockwood, The study of HF radio waves propagated over a long, sub-auroral path, Exeter University, UK, 1978 (http://lib.exeter.ac.uk/record=b1308620~S6)
* Saas-Fe Book (2004), J.D. Haigh, M. Lockwood and M.S. Giampapa, The Sun, Solar Analogs and the Climate, Springer, , 2004
* M. Lockwood Reconstruction and Prediction of Variations in the Open Solar Magnetic Flux and Interplanetary Conditions, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, 10, 4, 2013.
* M. Lockwood, Solar Influence on Global and Regional Climate, Surveys in Geophysics, 33 (3), 503–534, 2012.
* M. Lockwood et al., The rise and fall of open solar flux during the current grand solar maximum, Ap. J., 700 (2), 937–944, 2009.
* M. Lockwood et al., A doubling of the sun's coronal magnetic field during the last 100 years, Nature, 399, 437–439, 1999.
* S.W.H. Cowley and M. Lockwood, Excitation and decay of solar-wind driven flows in the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, Annales Geophys., 10, 103–115, 1992.
* M. Lockwood et al., Ionospheric signatures of pulsed magnetic reconnection at the Earth's magnetopause, Nature, 361 (6411), 424–428, 1993 , 1993
* M. Lockwood et al., Non-Maxwellian ion velocity distributions observed using EISCAT, Geophys. Res. Lett., 14, 111–114, 1987.
* M. Lockwood et al., The geomagnetic mass spectrometer – mass and energy dispersions of ionospheric ion flows into the magnetosphere, Nature, 316, 612–613, 1985.
* more than 400 journal publications
References
External links
Mike Lockwood
Q and A interview
Mike Lockwood
webpage at University of Reading
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lockwood, Michael
1954 births
Living people
People educated at The Skinners' School
English physicists
Place of birth missing (living people)
Academics of the University of Reading
Fellows of the Royal Society
Alumni of the University of Exeter
Recipients of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society