Old Member shortlisted for NERC Impact Award

Balliol College Oxford | Tuesday 6 November

We congratulate Paul Williams (Balliol 1995) on being shortlisted for a 2018 NERC Impact Award for his work on improving aviation turbulence forecasts.

The awards aim to 'celebrate and reward NERC-funded researchers, as individuals or teams, whose work has had substantial impact on the economy and society either in the UK or abroad' and are judged by independent panels of esteemed academic, industry and government figures. Paul Williams has been shortlisted in the Societal Impact category for his work on making flights smoother and safer. As Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the Department of Meteorology, he 'has worked with US scientists to develop an algorithm to predict in-flight turbulence. Following breakthroughs in 2008 and 2012, their algorithm has been used by the US National Weather Service to create turbulence forecasts since 2015, improving the safety of air travel for up to 2.5 billion passenger journeys so far, and also helping to make flying greener by reducing CO2 emissions.'

You can read more about Paul Williams' air turbulence forecasting algorithm here and in NERC's Planet Earth article here.

Paul recently spent a period in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden and was a contributor to the Channel 4 documentaries The World's Wildest Weather and Britain's Wildest Weather.

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