RMetS Awards

The Royal Meteorological Society recognises and rewards excellence, through its medals and awards, to people and teams who have made outstanding and exceptional contributions to meteorology and related disciplines. The Society’s awards reflect the breadth of work in the meteorological community and it can be one of the most rewarding activities to honour peers and colleagues for their contributions to the science and profession, and through education and outreach. There are awards that recognise distinguished careers, honour outstanding contributions and reward important and original contributions of early-career scientists.

We are incredibly proud of the work and achievements of all our award winners. Over recent decades the nature and extent of contributions of our members has broadened substantially, as meteorology and related disciplines have become more central to education, business and policy. It’s important to the Society that our awards continue to reflect the breadth of work in the meteorological community, as well as maintaining a link to more than 170 years of Society history. Therefore in 2021 we carried out an audit and membership survey to help us build a modernised portfolio. 

Our basic principles of recognising and rewarding excellence to people and teams who have made outstanding and exceptional contributions to meteorology and related disciplines have not changed. Members told us that they would like to see a broader range of awards, so we have introduced awards recognising innovation in use of observations and instrumentation and in use of models, computational tools and visualisation. Members told us that awards and monetary prizes for early-career achievements were particularly helpful for career development. We now have an early career communication award and focussed our monetary prizes on early career awards. We also slightly amended the remit of some of our existing awards to make these accessible to a broader range of nominees, including co-authors and teams/collaborations.

Our members told us it was sometimes difficult to find the right award for the person you want to nominate so we have grouped our portfolio into 4 sections based on the activities of the Society and its members: “Advancing Science”, “Educating, Inspiring and Enthusing”, “Impact on Science, Policy and Society”, and “Contribution or Service to the Society or Profession”.

A list of historical award winners from 1978-2021 is available in addition to a shorter summary of winners from 2011-2021. Details of the winners of the newly structured 2022 Awards can be viewed here.