Trevor McDougall


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

Education

After attending Unley High School in Adelaide, South Australia, McDougall went to St Mark's College (University of Adelaide) and graduated from the University of Adelaide in Mechanical Engineering in 1974. He 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.

Research and career

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. In 1978 he returned to Australia on a Queen's Fellowship in Marine Science at the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University. After five years at ANU he was appointed to CSIRO in Hobart as a physical oceanographer. Since 2012 he has been Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
McDougall's research in physical oceanography has provided insight to how seawater mixes under different conditions, which is important for understanding climate change. The ocean and the atmosphere play roughly equal roles in transporting heat from the equatorial region to the poles, and McDougall's research is concerned with how the ocean reduces the equator-to-pole temperature differences, thus making Earth habitable.
McDougall is known for developing, together with David Jackett, an algorithm for defining neutral density surfaces. These are the surfaces along which swirling ocean eddies — that are 10–500 kilometres wide and persist for many months — mix. The rate of turbulent mixing in the ocean is a factor of ten million times stronger along "density" surfaces than in the direction across these surfaces. The accurate modelling of the ocean’s role in climate relies on being able to accurately define and evaluate these surfaces. McDougall has also made significant contributions to incorporating the concepts of mixing and heat into ocean models.
He was president of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 2019-2023 and is past president for 2023-2027. He 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.

Awards and honours

McDougall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He is also 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 . His other awards include: