PEOPLE

Dr. Tom Lyons, Scientific Consultant
Professor of Environmental Science, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia

Professor Lyons holds one of two established chairs within the School of Environmental Science at Murdoch University and has published widely in refereed scientific journals and as well as providing a large number of reports to industry. Together with graduate students, his research has concentrated on applied aspects of the atmospheric boundary layer. In particular, it has focussed on the mesoscale meteorology of the Swan coastal plain with respect to air pollution and atmosphere-land interaction resulting from large scale clearing in the south west of Western Australia. This research has involved the development of instrumentation and pioneered the use of aircraft observations of downslope flows associated with the 300 m Darling Scarp (Pitts and Lyons, 1989) and their subsequent modelling. It also lead to a novel approach for modelling the spatial variation of motor vehicle emissions across the metropolitan area (Lyons et al., 1986) and their incorporation into an urban airshed model. Research in the south west of Western Australia has combined detailed aircraft, satellite and surface observations (Lyons et al., 1993) with a numerical boundary layer model (Huang and Lyons, 1995) to understand the meteorological impact of large scale land use changes (Huang et al., 1995; Lyons, 2002). All of this research has been directed towards the practical application of meteorological data and analysis towards the solution of environmental problems. As such it has contributed to an improved understanding of the mesoscale meteorology of the Swan coastal plain and the interaction between the atmosphere and the underlying heterogeneous terrain.

Academic Qualifications:
BSc (1970) (University of Melbourne) Physics
BSc(Hons) (1971) (University of Melbourne) Meteorology
PhD (1976) (Flinders University of South Australia) Atmospheric Science

Career History since 1990
1990-1991 : Visiting Research Fellow, Riso National Laboratory, Roskilde, Denmark.
1991-1994 : Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia.
1994-current: Professor of Environmental Science, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia.
1994-1996 : Dean, School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia.
1997-1999 : Executive Dean, Division of Science and Engineering, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia.
2001-2001 : Visiting Professor, Department of Hydrology, Uppsala, University, Uppsala, Sweden.
1998-2000 : Vice President, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
2000-2002 : National President, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
2002-current : Immediate Past President, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Learned Societies:
Fellow - Royal Meteorological Society (UK), Member - Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Member - American Meteorological Society, Member - Royal Society of Western Australia, Member - Australian Institute of Physics

Related and Significant publications
Huang Xinmei, T.J. Lyons, R.C.G. Smith and J.M. Hacker, 1995: Estimation of land surface parameters using satellite data. In Kalma, J.D. and M. Sivapalan (editors), Scale issues in hydrological modelling, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 387-399.

Huang Xinmei, T.J. Lyons and R.C.G. Smith, 1995: The meteorological impact of replacing native perennial vegetation with annual agricultural species. In Kalma, J.D. and M. Sivapalan (editors), Scale issues in hydrological modelling, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 401-410.

Lyons, T.J., P. Schwerdtfeger, J.M. Hacker, I.J. Foster, R.G.C. Smith and Huang Xinmei, 1993: Land atmosphere interaction in a semiarid region -the bunny fence experiment. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 74, 1327-1334.

Huang Xinmei, T.J. Lyons, R.C.G. Smith, J.M. Hacker and P. Schwerdtfeger, 1993: Estimation of surface energy balance from radiant surface temperature and NOAA AVHRR sensor reflectances over agricultural and native vegetation. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 32, 1441-1449.

Huang Xinmei, T.J. Lyons, R.C.G. Smith and J.M. Hacker, 1995: Estimation of land surface parameters using satellite data. Hydrological Processes, 9, 631-643.
Huang Xinmei, T.J. Lyons and R.C.G. Smith, 1995: The meteorological impact of replacing native perennial vegetation with annual agricultural species. Hydrological Processes, 9, 645-654.

Huang Xinmei and T.J. Lyons, 1995: On the simulation of surface heat fluxes in a land surface-atmosphere model. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 34, 1099-1111.

Lyons, T.J., R.C.G. Smith and Huang Xinmei, 1996: The impact of clearing for agriculture on the surface energy balance. International Journal of Climatology, 16, 551-558.

Fuqin Li and T.J. Lyons, 1999: Estimation of regional evapotranspiration through remote sensing. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 38, 1644-1654.

Lyons, T.J., Li Fuqin, J.M. Hacker, Wan-Li Cheng and Huang Xinmei. 2001: Regional turbulent statistics over contrasting natural surfaces. Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, 78, 183-194.

Li Fuqin and T.J. Lyons, 2002: Remote estimation of regional evapotranspiration. Environmental Modelling and Software, 17, 61-75.

Lyons, T.J., 2002: Clouds prefer native vegetation. Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, 80, 131-140.

Esau, I.N. and T.J. Lyons, 2002: Effect of sharp vegetation boundary on the convective atmospheric boundary layer. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 114, 3-13.

Lyons, T.J. and S. Halldin, 2003: Surface heterogeneity and the spatial variation of fluxes. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (in press).

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