Named for oceanographer Roger Revelle, who died in July 1991, the award honors individuals who have contributed to understanding the processes involved in the Earth's atmosphere, including its dynamics, chemistry, and radiation.
Revelle--former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., now a part of the University of California, San Diego--was best known as a co-founder of the theory of plate tectonics, which states that the ocean floor moves because of an upward flow of heat from the Earth's interior.
Honoree Lorenz's work focuses primarily on chaos theory as a way of explaining atmospheric science.
"In modern terminology, chaos has been used to colloquially mean something that is not random but still looks random," he explains. "Chaos is something that is determined by precise laws yet behaves rather unpredictably in any one case."
As a meteorologist, Lorenz has applied this idea to the ever- changing weather patterns ...
