A Heady Atmosphere of Fellows

2018 AMS Fellow Aiguo Dai of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. (Photo by Mark Schmidt)

Professor Aiguo Dai of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES), named in late July a 2017 Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, will receive his award at AMS’s 98th Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, next January.

AMS fellows are chosen based on “outstanding contributions to the atmospheric or related oceanic or hydrologic sciences or their applications during a substantial period of years," according the organization’s award criteria. New fellows are chosen each year by the Fellows Committee from a group no larger than two-tenths of 1 percent of all AMS members.

Dai becomes the sixth DAES faculty member to be so honored. The others are Lance Bozart, Robert Fovell, Daniel Keyser, John Molinari and current DAES chair Christopher Thorncroft.

Dai’s distinguished career began in his native China and extended to the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies/Columbia University, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., before he came to UAlbany in 2012.

He has conducted extensive research dealing with much of the Earth’s climate system, including interactions of its many different components. Through this work, science and the public have acquired an enhanced understanding of the global water cycle, atmospheric convection and precipitation processes, atmospheric tides, climate model diagnostics and evaluation, long-term climate change, climate data analysis, hydrometeorology, Asian monsoons and drought.

Dai is listed by Thomson Reuters among the world's top 1 percent of highly cited researchers in all fields, a level attained by only 4-6 scholars from the entire SUNY system during 2014-2016. He is currently UAlbany’s most cited scholar, according to Google Scholar.

Dai received his B.S. degree from Nanjing University and his master’s from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing and obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1996. He was a scientist at NCAR from 1997 to 2012, the last four years at NCAR’s second highest research category, Scientist III.

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