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.
For further information, please contact:
Jack Saunders
Communications Advisor, Media Relations
Environment Canada
Tel: (416) 739-4785
Cell: (416) 301-0648
Kari Brintnell
Communications Advisor
Environment Canada
Tel: (819) 953-5946
Cell: (613) 513-5539
