Academician Pao K. Wang, former Director of Research Center for Environmental Changes, received the Nikolai Dotzek Award from the European Severe Storm Laboratory (ESSL). The Nikolai Dotzek Award is the most prestigious award in the severe weather research community.

Academician Wang’s recent research has focused on the thermodynamic and other dynamic mechanisms at the top of severe storms. He proposed the cloud top internal gravity wave breaking theory and successfully verified it with both visible and infrared meteorological satellite imageries.

ESSL’s citation to Academician Wang for this award is as follows:
“Professor Pao K. Wang […] has used very high-resolution cloud models to simulate the processes at the top of convective storms. Simulations showed that overshooting tops act as obstacles to the anvil-relative wind. Thus, most of the storm top features that we observe from a satellite, such as cold rings, cold-Us, or above-anvil cirrus plumes result from the interaction between overshooting tops and the ambient flow.”

ESSL is a European research and development consortium, aimed at promoting the science of severe storms and advancing forecast techniques through academic research and technology development. Its current membership consists of 23 meteorological science/tech institutions from 17 countries.