23-26 March 2009 Scoping Meeting Invited Speaker

Neville Nicholls

Dr. Neville Nicholls has spent more than 35 years in climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and, since 2006, at Monash University (where he is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow). He was an LA for the detection and attribution chapter in the IPCC AR4 WGI report, and had overall responsibility for collating information about extremes across the WGI report. He was also a member of the Core Writing Team for the AR4 Synthesis Report. Previously, he was the CLA for the observed climate variability and change chapter in the SAR.

He has published more than 150 refereed journal papers and book chapters on the nature, causes, impacts and predictability of climate variations and change. Much of his work prior to 1990 was on developing systems using the El Niño - Southern Oscillation to predict climate variations and their impacts on agriculture and ecosystems. Since the mid-1990s his work has focussed on changes in extremes, including tropical cyclones, temperature and precipitation extremes, droughts and El Niño, and very recently, on the impact of climate on wildfire occurrence. Neville has a long-standing research interest in the links between climate and health, including developing an operational heat alert system for his home city of Melbourne, designing methods for predicting arbovirus epidemics, and documenting the mental health impacts of drought. He is Vice-President of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and an editor of the new journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. Neville was an editor of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate for five years.