CC&E’s Father of Paleotempestology to receive AGU’s prestigious Gilbert F. White Award

BATON ROUGE - Gilbert F. White was a groundbreaking geographer named the “father of floodplain management” for his pioneering work on flooding and natural hazards.

It is only fitting, then, that CC&E’s own “father of paleotempestology”, Kam-biu Liu, receive the Gilbert F White Award and Distinguished Lecture from the American Geophysical Union.

Liu pioneered the field of paleotempestology, which is the study of the history of hurricanes on a millennial timescale, using both geological and archival evidence, especially coastal sediment records. He is the George Barineau III Professor in the Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences, or DOCS.

“Dr. Liu’s research has brought attention and accolades to LSU for nearly 40 years now,” said Robert Rohli, a fellow professor in DOCS.  “His work on paleotempestology has given us our best scientific estimates of the frequency and intensity that hurricanes have hit various places along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the U.S. for thousands of years before the instrumental period of record, based on the overwash of coastal sediments that could have only been deposited by such storms.”

Rohli continued, “This is important because it tells us about the natural variability of these storms that impact us so directly.  And he and his students and other collaborators have done so much other work about climate variability in east Asia, the Amazon basin, and many other places.”

The award is the latest in a string of accolades for Liu, who has been funded by the National Science Foundation more than 30 times in the past thirty years. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the American Association of Geographers’ Climate Specialty Group and the Paleoenvironmental Change group. Most recently he was awarded the LSU Presidential Laurels.

Liu’s work has taken him from the Yangtze River Delta, the Amazon Rainforest, to the Canadian Boreal Forest and, of course coastal regions around the United States.

Among the notable achievements this research has allowed him are the identification of a hyper-active period about 3800 to 1000 years ago, when the Gulf Coast was hit by catastrophic hurricanes several times more frequently.

He also created the longest history of tropical cyclone activity in the world when he used Chinese historical records to reconstruct a thousand-year history of typhoon landfalls.

Liu will receive the award at the AGU meeting in Washington DC in December. The group has also invited him to deliver the Gilbert F White Distinguished Lecture on December 9th.