10 Facts About Trevor McDougall

Trevor John McDougall is an Australian physical oceanographer specialising in ocean mixing and the thermodynamics of seawater.

Trevor McDougall is Emeritus Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and is past president of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.

Trevor McDougall obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in 1978 from the University of Cambridge and a Graduate Diploma in Economics from the Australian National University in 1982.

Trevor McDougall undertook his PhD studies in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and St John's College, Cambridge of the University of Cambridge where he was supervised by Professors Stewart Turner and Paul Linden.

The ocean and the atmosphere play roughly equal roles in transporting heat from the equatorial region to the poles, and Trevor McDougall's research is concerned with how the ocean reduces the equator-to-pole temperature differences, thus making Earth habitable.

Trevor McDougall is known for developing, together with David Jackett, an algorithm for defining neutral density surfaces.

Trevor McDougall has made significant contributions to incorporating the concepts of mixing and heat into ocean models.

Trevor McDougall chaired the working group of SCOR and IAPSO that developed the international standard definitions of the thermodynamic properties of seawater, humid air, and ice, which were adopted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 2009.

Trevor McDougall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.

Trevor McDougall is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the CSIRO, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of New South Wales, the American Geophysical Union, and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.