TORONTO,
Ontario, May 30, 2006 – Dr. Michel Béland,
Director General of Environment Canada's Atmospheric
Science and Technology Directorate, today was
awarded the 2005 Patterson Distinguished Service
Medal for outstanding service to meteorology in
Canada. This prestigious honour was presented
to Dr. Béland at the 40th annual Congress
of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic
Society (CMOS) in Toronto.
The Patterson Distinguished
Service Medal, first presented in 1954, is considered
the pre-eminent award recognizing outstanding
work in meteorology by residents of Canada. This
award is named in honour of Dr. John Patterson,
a meteorologist who was Director and Controller
of the Meteorological Service of Canada from 1929
to 1946, a crucial period in the development of
Canada's weather service.
Dr. Béland, described
by a colleague as "a passionate scientist,
his passion being infectious," has made numerous
contributions, both nationally and internationally,
in advancing the scientific knowledge base in
the fields of meteorology and environmental prediction.
Dr. Béland was recently elected President
of the World Meteorological Organization's Commission
for Atmospheric Sciences. He is also the Vice-President-elect
of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change
Research in the Americas; the Co-Chair of the
International Joint Scientific Steering Committee
for the International Polar Year; and the Chair
of the International Core Steering Committee for
THORPEX (The Observing-system, Research and Predictability
Experiment), a major global atmospheric research
program to improve 1-to-14-day weather forecasts.
Dr. Béland began his
career at Environment Canada in 1978 as a research
scientist, focusing on atmospheric turbulence,
numerical weather prediction and numerical modeling.
In 1993, Dr. Béland became Director of
the Meteorological Research Branch. In this capacity,
he managed a major research program covering most
aspects of modern meteorology, from Doppler radars,
research aircraft and cloud physics to satellite
data assimilation techniques and global numerical
weather prediction models on a suite of Canada's
most powerful scientific supercomputers. Dr. Béland
contributed significantly to positioning the Canadian
Meteorological Centre as one of the five best
National Centres in the world for the accuracy
of its products, a position which it still occupies
to this day.
In his current position, which
he assumed in 1999, Dr. Béland is responsible
for the management and scientific leadership of
Environment Canada's research and development
programs in air quality, climate and meteorological
sciences, as well as adaptation and impacts research
and atmospheric science integration and assessment.
The program employs more than 325 scientists and
support scientists across Canada, with major laboratories
in Victoria, Toronto and Montreal and smaller
labs in the Arctic (Eureka, Alert), on the East
coast (Halifax) and elsewhere in Canada.
A fundamental tenet of Dr. Béland's
vision for Environment Canada's science is the
concept of a unified approach to weather, climate,
air quality and Earth-system prediction systems
that eventually will bring together the meteorological,
ocean, atmospheric and ecosystem research communities.
Dr. Béland, 57, is a
native of Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. He has
graduated from Université Laval in 1971
with a B.Sc. in Physics and received his M.Sc.
and Ph.D. in Meteorology from McGill University
in 1973 and 1977, respectively, in atmospheric
dynamics and numerical weather prediction. Vice-President
of CMOS in 1994 and President in 1995, he also
has memberships in the American Meteorological
Society, the Computational Fluid Dynamics Society
of Canada and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
