Former director of Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academician Pao K. Wang, received the Nikolai Dotzek Award from European Severe Storm Laboratory (ESSL). This is the most prestigious award in the global severe weather research community. ESSL is not a physical laboratory, rather it is a European multinational research and development consortium. Its main goal is to combine academic research and technological development to perform forecast experiments to promote the advancement of the science and forecast techniques of severe storms. Its current membership consists of 23 meteorological science/tech institutions from 17 countries. Academician Wang’s recent research has been focusing on the thermodynamic and dynamic mechanisms at the top of severe storms. He proposed the theory of cloud top internal gravity wave breaking and utilized both visible and infrared imageries of meteorological satellites to successfully verify it.

ESSL’s citation to Academician Wang for this award is:

“Professor Pao K. Wang, who 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.”

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 Academician Pao K. Wang received the Nikolai Dotzek Award in person on May 10th, 2023, and attended the 11th European Conference on Severe Storms in Bucharest, Romania.