Women in Science

Dr Yukari Takayabu, Professor, University of Tokyo, and Co-Chair, Working Group on Tropical Meteorology Research, WMO World Weather Research Programme (WWRP), will be recognized by the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) with the 2024 Joanne Simpson Tropical Meteorology Research Award. The AMS Award will be granted to Dr Takayabu in recognition of her contribution toward advancing the understanding of the physics and dynamics of the tropical atmosphere. The 2024 AMS prize ceremony will be held at the 104th AMS Annual Meeting from 28 January to 1 February 2024, in Baltimore, Maryland.

To those following her career, the award comes as no surprise given her contributions to climatology, meteorology, global precipitation measurement and atmospheric sciences since she obtained her PhD in Geophysics from the University of Tokyo in 1993.  Dr Takayabu started her professional career at the National Institute for Environmental Studies where she remained until 2000.  Thereafter, she was engaged at the Centre for Climate System Studies at the University of Tokyo. Since 2006, she has also served as the Group Leader at the Institute of Observational Research for Global Change, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

Her research interests are many, but her work on the dynamics of tropical atmospheric disturbances coupled with cumulus convection and multiscale interactions from mesoscale convective systems to global-scale climate variations stood above the rest. She focused on the characterization of cloud and precipitation systems utilizing various kinds of spaceborne measurements, with recent emphases on analyzing TRMM data. Her research has been widely cited, the most popular include: 

• The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission for Science and Society, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 98, 1679-1695. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00306.1
• Shallow and deep latent heating modes over tropical oceans observed with TRMM PR spectral latent heating data, J. Climate, 23, 2030-2046. https://doi.org/10.1175/2009JCLI3110.1 
• Weak linkage between the heaviest rainfall and tallest storms, Nat. Commun., Vol. 6(6213), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7213 

Dr Takayabu is an inspiration to women in science as well as early career researchers who aspire to work in the field. WMO  congratulates Dr Takayabu and is proud of her many achievements , especially in the WWRP community.