The Royal Society of New South Wales congratulates Professor Steven Sherwood FRSN on his election as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest Earth and space science association.

His decades-long work analysing climate science has addressed two important questions: How much will the world warm in future? And how readily could we adapt?

He commented that ‘one practical goal of the work is to figure out how climate models might be improved for regional predictions of weather and climate. A more academic goal is just to unlock the secrets of our atmosphere.’

Professor Sherwood’s work has demonstrated how severe global warming and humidity can produce heat stress beyond human tolerance. He has also identified errors in weather balloon data that were hiding warming and pinpointed how water vapour is mixed in the troposphere and enters the stratosphere.