Julie Arblaster

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Julie Michelle Arblaster is an Australian climate scientist and a full professor at Monash University. She studies how the Earth’s climate works, how it has changed in the past, and what might happen in the future. Her work uses climate models to understand patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, such as the Southern Annular Mode and the Indian Ocean Dipole, and how these relate to extreme weather.

She grew up in Swan Hill, Victoria, and studied atmospheric science at Macquarie University, earning a Bachelor of Technology and First Class Honours in 1995. She completed a Master of Science at the University of Colorado in 1999 and earned a PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2013 on Drivers of Southern Hemisphere Climate Change.

Her career included time at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the United States from 1999 to 2003, followed by work in Australia with the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (a CSIRO-Bureau of Meteorology partnership) from 2003 to 2016. She joined Monash University in 2016 and was promoted to full professor in 2020.

Arblaster contributed to major IPCC reports, for which the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. She was a lead author on Chapter 12 of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (2013), which looked at long-term climate change and emissions. She has also contributed to ozone assessments with the World Meteorological Organization and to climate science groups such as SPARC.

Her research helped show that changes in the sun’s activity play a role in climate but cannot explain all global warming. She continues to explore how Antarctic ozone recovery and greenhouse gases will shape future climate and weather, including extremes.

Awards include the Anton Hales Medal from the Australian Academy of Science (2014) for earth sciences and the Priestley Medal from the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (2017). She is recognized as one of the most influential Earth scientists of the 2010s.