NEW YORK: Jagadish Shukla, Distinguished University Professor of Climate Dynamics, George Mason University and President, Institute of Global Environment and Society has been conferred the World Meteorological Organization's 52nd International Meteorological Organization Prize in recognition of his research.Shukla will receive the honors at the National Academy of Sciences on March 28.

The coveted prize comes in recognition of Shukla's research on monsoons and coupled ocean-land-atmosphere interactions establishing a scientific basis for predictability of climate in the midst of chaotic weather, leading to the introduction of routine operational dynamical seasonal prediction, and his contributions to fostering international cooperation in weather and climate research by developing and leading numerous international research programs and creating new institutions worldwide for improving weather and climate research and betterment of global society.

He is an internationally acclaimed researcher, educator, and institution builder, whose work has led to substantially greater understanding of the predictability of climate. His scientific contributions include research on the Asian monsoon, deforestation, desertification, and predictability of weather and climate.

His research has established the existence of predictability in the midst of chaos and provided a scientific basis for short-term climate prediction.Shukla is the author or coauthor of nearly 200 scientific papers.He received the BSc, MSc, and PhD from the Benaras Hindu University, India, and the ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has been awarded the Carl-Gustav Rossby Research Medal of the American Meteorological Society, the Walker Gold Medal of the Indian Meteorological Society, and the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the Indian Meteorological Society, and the American Geophysical Union, and an associate fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the developing world.

He is a member of the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Program and chair of its Modeling Panel.Shukla founded the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA), a premier scientific research center devoted to understanding climate variability and predictability on intraseasonal to decadal time scales within a changing climate.Shukla was instrumental in the creation of the National Centre for Medium Range

Weather Forecasting in New Delhi; the weather and climate research group at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; and several other research institutions in the United States and abroad. He founded the Gandhi College in his birth village of Mirdha, India, for the education of rural women in the Ballia District of Uttar Pradesh.