Michael Lockwood (physicist)

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Michael Lockwood

Michael "Mike" Lockwood FRS (born 1954) is a Professor of Space Environment Physics at Reading University.

Life and works

Schooled at The Skinners' School, Tunbridge Wells, he earned his BSc (1975) and then PhD (1978) degrees at Exeter University. Much of his career has been with Rutherford Appleton Laboratory but he has also worked at University of Southampton, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and University of Auckland. His research interests comprise, among others, variations in the magnetic fields of the Sun, interplanetary space, and the Earth and in general solar influence on global and regional climate. He has served as the Chair of the Council of EISCAT and as a Council member for the British Natural Environment Research Council.

His lectures at the Saas-Fee Advanced Course The Sun, Solar Analogs and the Climate, together with contributions of e.g. Joanna Haigh and Mark Giampapa where published as a book by Springer 2006.

He played football during his postdoc studies in a team called the Merry Pranksters of Exeter University Sunday League fame. He still plays guitar for the band Dumber than Chickens, however not as professionally as his namesake Michael Lockwood (guitarist).

Positions on solar influence on global and regional climate

2012 he criticized the scientific field as having been corrupted by unwelcome political and financial influence as climate change sceptics have seized upon putative solar effects as an excuse for inaction on anthropogenic warming.

2007 Lockwood co-authored a paper about solar data from the past 40 years. He was partly inspired to conduct the study after seeing the Great Global Warming Swindle, which contends that the Sun is the primary cause of recent climate change. He found that between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could affect climate performed an "U-turn in every possible way". Lockwood 2007 told the New Scientist that he seriously doubted that solar influences were a big factor compared to anthropogenic influences: to explain the lack of global cooling since 1987 would require a very long response timeconstant to any solar forcing which is not found in detected responses to volcanic forcing.

However, Lockwood stresses the distinction between global climate change and regional-and-seasonal climate changes and is of the opinion that solar modulation of the winter, northern hemisphere jet stream might well result in Europe experiencing a higher fraction of cold winters. From past variations of the Sun deduced from cosmogenic isotopes he concludes that a slide into a new Maunder minimum is possible over the next 50–100 years. The biggest impact of such a decline in solar activity would be a higher occurrence frequency of relatively cold winters in the UK and across Europe, each of which would be accompanied by a relatively warm one elsewhere (for example in Greenland). Thus, Lockwood sees no evidence at all of another (global) ice age coming, but thinks more regionally diverse effects of low solar activity are possible.

Awards

• 1990 The Zel'dovich Award for Commission C (Ionospheric Physics, named after Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich). Awarded by COSPAR (The Committee on Space Research, of the International Council of Scientific Unions).
• 1990 The Issac Koga Gold Medal. Awarded by URSI - The International Union of Radio Science. Named after Issac Koga.
• 1998 The Chapman Medal. Awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, London. Named after Sydney Chapman (mathematician).
• 2003 The Charles Chree (now renamed the Appleton) Award and Prize. Awarded by the Institute of Physics, London. Named after Charles Chree and Edward Victor Appleton.
• 2006 Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London
• 2012 The Julius Bartels Medal. Awarded by the European Geosciences Union. Named after Julius Bartels
• 2015 The Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Works

• M. Lockwood, The study of HF radio waves propagated over a long, sub-auroral path, Exeter University, UK, 1978
• Saas-Fe Book (2004), J.D. Haigh, M. Lockwood and M.S. Giampapa, The Sun, Solar Analogs and the Climate, Springer, ISBN 3-540-23856-5, 2004
• M. Lockwood Reconstruction and Prediction of Variations in the Open Solar Magnetic Flux and Interplanetary Conditions, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, 10, 4, 2013. doi:10.12942/lrsp-2013-4
• M. Lockwood, Solar Influence on Global and Regional Climate, Surveys in Geophysics, 33 (3), 503-534, 2012. doi:10.1007/s10712-012-9181-3
• M. Lockwood et al., The rise and fall of open solar flux during the current grand solar maximum, Ap. J., 700 (2), 937-944, 2009. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/700/2/937
• M. Lockwood et al., A doubling of the sun's coronal magnetic field during the last 100 years, Nature, 399, 437-439, 1999. doi:10.1038/20867
• S.W.H. Cowley and M. Lockwood, Excitation and decay of solar-wind driven flows in the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, Annales Geophys., 10, 103-115, 1992.
• M. Lockwood et al., Ionospheric signatures of pulsed magnetic reconnection at the Earth's magnetopause, Nature, 361 (6411), 424-428, 1993 doi:10.1038/361424a0, 1993
• M. Lockwood et al., Non-Maxwellian ion velocity distributions observed using EISCAT, Geophys. Res. Lett., 14, 111-114, 1987. doi:10.1029/GL014i002p00111
• M. Lockwood et al., The geomagnetic mass spectrometer - mass and energy dispersions of ionospheric ion flows into the magnetosphere, Nature, 316, 612-613, 1985. doi:10.1038/316612a0
• >300 journal publications

External links

• Michael Lockwood profile at University of Reading
• Mike Lockwood CV