Congratulations to Prof Ed Hawkins FRMetS on receiving his MBE

Congratulations to our Fellow - Prof Ed Hawkins, who was awarded his MBE from our Patron HRH The Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle yesterday, for services to Climate Science and to Science Communication.

Ed Hawkins is internationally recognised for creating the climate stripes art that defines our warming world and is a regular speaker at our Society events. He has also been supporting the climate communications training that we have been delivering to the main UK broadcasters in the lead-up to COP26.

Ed made the climate stripes freely available on showyourstripes.info in 2019, with more than a million people downloading them in the first week. Broadcast meteorologists and climate scientists united on 21 June this year to use the stripes for ‘Show Your Stripes’ day to raise awareness of the urgent need to act on climate change. This was backed by UN Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He has published several high-profile studies into the effects and causes of climate change and helped the public engage with climate science through the citizen science project WeatherRescue.org, which saw thousands of volunteers transcribe over 4 million historical weather observations to make them usable by climate scientists. Earlier this year he won the Society’s Geoscience Data Journal Editors’ Award alongside Dr Philip Craig for his work on the project, which was published in the Geoscience Data Journal in 2020.

Professor Hawkins’ MBE also won the Society’s Climate Science Communication Award in 2016.