• Dr John Church
• Dr Neil White
• Dr John Hunter
• Dr Kathy McInnes
• Dr Mark Hemer

Dr John Church

John Church is an oceanographer with the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and has published across a broad range of topics in oceanography. His area of particular expertise is the role of the ocean in climate, particularly anthropogenic climate change. He is co-editor of a book “Ocean Circulation and Climate” published by Academic Press. He has been a Principal Investigator on NASA/CNES Topex/Poseidon and Jason Science Working Teams since 1987. He was co-convening lead author for the Chapter on Sea Level in the IPCC Third Assessment Report. He was Co-Chair of the international Scientific Steering Group for the World Ocean Circulation Experiment from 1994 to 1998, Chaired the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme from 2006 to 2008 and CoChaired the 2006 WCRP Understanding Sea-level Rise and Variability Workshop. He was awarded the 2006 Roger Revelle Medal by Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, was a winner of a CSIRO Medal for Research Achievement in 2006, won the 2007 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research and presented the 2008 AMOS R.H. Clarke Lecture. He is a member of the IPCC team that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr Neil White

Neil White has been closely involved in both in situ and remotely sensed (especially satellite altimeter) oceanographic data since he joined the then fledgling CSIRO Division of Oceanography in 1983. He ran the data processing group for the RV Franklin Marine National Facility for 10 years and also acted as a Data Quality Expert for WOCE (the World Ocean Circulation Experiment). He started getting involved with satellite altimeter data with data from the GEOSAT Exact Repeat Mission in the late 1980s and has made significant contributions to data processing techniques and to calibration of the high quality satellites TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1. This work is ongoing and we are now gearing up for the launch of Jason-2 in 2008. He is also involved in research work using various types of sea level data, and has acted as an expert reviewer for the recent (AR4) IPCC report.

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Dr John Hunter

John Hunter works as an oceanographer at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, which is based in the University of Tasmania. His current interests are the sea level rise induced by climate change, and the response of Antarctic Ice Shelves to global warming. Recent work has involved investigations of sea level rise in Australia, the U.S., and in the Indian Ocean and Pacific regions, and the way in which this rise increases the frequency of extreme sea level events. He has recently completed estimates of future high sea level extremes for Tasmania, by combining the present exceedance statistics with projections of the (uncertain) sea level rise for the 21st century. Other interests are the numerical modelling of shelf, coastal and estuarine marine systems, and problems in applied marine science. In 1996 he was a joint recipient of the CSIRO Chairman's Medal for his work on the Port Phillip Bay Environmental Study.

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Dr Kathy McInnes

Dr Kathy McInnes joined the Climate Impact Group of CSIRO Atmospheric Research in 1990 after completing her Ph.D. on the modeling of severe weather events in Australia. Since 1993, she has applied her numerical modelling skills to the modelling of tides and storm surges and the physical processes leading to coastal flooding. She also has an ongoing interest in how severe weather events such as cold fronts, east coast lows and tropical cyclones may be affected by Greenhouse warming. Her storm surge work has seen her undertake studies in Cairns, the Gold Coast, Port Hedland, Bass Strait, the NSW coast, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Samoa and Fiji. Her work is now focused on risk assessment approaches to determining how climate change will impact storm surge frequencies and intensities at locations around Australia and the south Pacific. She is a member of an expert advisory group convened by the Australian Greenhouse Office to advise on a National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment and the Technical Risk Assessment Advisory Group for Geosciences Australia. She has been a contributing author to the IPCC second, third and fourth assessment reports.

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Dr Mark Hemer

Mark Hemer has been a Postdoctoral Fellow with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research since early 2006. His research interests span the physical processes which impact on the coastal, near-shore and continental shelf environments. In particular, he is interested in the coupling of these processes with climate variability. Mark completed his PhD at the University of Tasmania in 2003, in which he used models and field collected data to compare the oceanographic processes impacting on sedimentation in the wave-current dominated Torres Strait, and the much less dynamic sub-Amery Ice Shelf cavity, East Antarctica. Before joining CSIRO, Mark was employed as a physical sedimentologist with Geoscience Australia where he was a contributing author of the National Marine Bioregionalisation of Australia. His present research focuses on assessing the trends and variability of the surface ocean wave climate in the Australian region and the impacts such variability have on the coastal zone, when combined with the influences of sea level rise and storm surge variability.

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