Prepcom4

BIOGRAPHY

Having been raised on a small farm in eastern Australia, Matt has always appreciated the impact of weather and climate variability on agriculture and rural communities. He is now a scientist at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, conducting research on understanding and predicting the same variations that sparked his attention back then.

His university education began with a Bachelors degree from Macquarie University in Sydney in the early 1990s, and then progressed to a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA, which he completed in 1998. His dissertation research concerned the observations and theory of large-scale waves in the tropical atmosphere: convectively-coupled equatorial waves, that influence tropical weather on a large scale. This research resulted in the publication of several highly-referenced journal papers. His published research has also dealt with aspects of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, and interactions between different components of the climate system. For 1998 to 2000, he was a Postdoctoral fellow at the USA's National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Now at the Bureau of Meteorology, Matt has implemented an empirical scheme for monitoring and predicting tropical intraseasonal atmospheric variability. His operational responsibilities include keeping abreast of the current state of that variability, as well as the current state of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, a form of
interannual variability. Both forms of variability have a significant influence on the weather and climate of parts of Australia, and many parts of the globe in general.

IMAGES
Schematic of the "Madden-Julian Oscillation
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