David Wratt awarded New Year Honour

December 31st, 2011
[by David Armstrong]

Motueka-raised climate scientist Dr David Wratt was today named in the New Year Honour list, awarded The Queen's Service Order (QSO) for services to science.

David works at NIWA’s Wellington campus and is NIWA's chief climate scientist. NIWA is a crown-owned research and consultancy company, with a global reputation as experts in water and atmospheric research.

David has also been heavily involved in the work of IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in various capacities since about 1990. Presently he serves on the panel’s 30-strong Bureau (the steering committee), is vice-chair of Working Group 1 (which is concerned with the science of past, present, and future climate change), and is review editor for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

David, a Companion of the Royal Society of New Zealand, was a Coordinating Lead Author of the “Australia and New Zealand” chapter of the IPCC Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In a recent profile for NIWA's website, he said he grew up on a farm in Motueka. "I was always good at science and maths at school, so I went to the University of Canterbury to take a degree in physics." (It was there that he met the writer of this article through a Church youth group.)

"Then I stayed on to do a PhD in atmospheric science, using radar to study atmospheric physics 90km up. By the time I’d followed this theme through a post-doc at the University of Illinois in the States, I was ready for a change and came back to New Zealand to work for the Meteorological Service at Kelburn in Wellington.

"I was meant to train as a weather forecaster, but this was around the time of Think Big and the Met Service was charged with providing information to help minimise air-quality problems from the big industrial plants that were planned. So I ended up doing a lot of field work at proposed power station and industrial sites, trying to determine what would happen to any emissions, modelling how they might spread in the particular terrain, and generally developing expertise in that field rather than weather forecasting."

Later, with restructure at the Met Service, he became the Research & Development manager and also started doing some work with climate change. Then when the Crown Research Institutes were established in 1992, the research and climate people from the Met Service were transferred into NIWA. "For me it was a chance to step away from management and get back into science," he said.

One of the first big programmes he was involved in at NIWA was a collaboration called SALPEX, the Southern Alps Experiments.

"The aim was to understand and model how the Alps influence New Zealand’s weather and climate, especially rainfall in the hydro catchment. We did some really interesting field work using the Australian CSIRO’s instrumented plane – a Fokker Friendship – to measure droplet size, winds, and so forth during our big field campaign in 1996.

"Since then, I’ve worked on some major studies that map present climate, climate variation, and soils within a region. We’re able to identify the areas where climate and soils suit various crops, and this helps people figure out the best use of their land.

"When we factor in future climate scenarios, we can help a lot of sectors – such as councils, farmers, tourism, and emergency managers – to plan ahead and adapt."

David maintains his links with Motueka and is a regular reader of Motueka Online, being a subscriber to our free weekly update service.

You can watch a video of David explaining some of his work here »

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