NATIONAL AUSTRALIA DAY COUNCIL ACHIEVEMENT MEDALLION, 2006

Winner's resolve forged by a blistering drought

As a teenager in Adelaide, David Jones took weather observations in the backyard during what would later be understood as an El Niño event. He particularly remembers 1983 as “pretty interesting”, with the Ash Wednesday bushfires and then drought-breaking thunderstorms and floods in March of that year.

David had already sweltered through the 1982 drought while living in Port Pirie. "There was just day after day of 40-degree heat," he recalls. "Somewhere, deep in my psyche, being subjected to extraordinary drought after a very wet 1981 in southern Australian really caught my imagination."

Years later, at Melbourne University, he was majoring in mathematics and chemistry but “switched midstream” to atmospheric sciences - and quite successfully.

This year, Dr David Jones received the National Australia Day Council Achievement Medallion from the Bureau of Meteorology for leadership of the bureau's Climate Analysis section. He was presented with the medallion in Melbourne on 25 January by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, the Hon Greg Hunt, MP.

Long-term impact in the short term

Deputy Director (Corporate Activities) Dr Bill Downey outlined David’s significant impact on the bureau’s climate services and research during his relatively short career:

In the two years after graduating from the 1995 meteorologist course, David led the rollout of automated spatial analyses and automated mapping (of rainfall and temperature, for example), quality control, and climate monitoring tools (for sea surface temperatures, for example), replacing the manual analyses.

From 1997 David worked in the bureau’s research centre developing the seasonal climate outlook for temperature, which was introduced as an operational product) in 2000. The Australian Greenhouse Office recognised the value of this service (which incorporated the work of colleagues Blair Trewin and Neville Nicholls) by signing a memorandum of understanding supporting the continued development of the bureau’s climate change website.

In early 2002 David was appointed Supervisor Climate Analysis during one of the most severe droughts on record. The unit was able to meet the unprecedented demand for climate services from government, media and the public.

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