Ian D. Rutherford

exec-dir@cmos.ca

Dr. Ian Rutherford was appointed Executive Director of CMOS in June 2004, replacing Dr. Neil Campbell who had been in that position since 1994. He served as Business Manager from early 2003 where he managed the takeover by CMOS of its own office functions from the Canadian Association of Physicists.

Following retirement from the public service in 1996, Ian managed the Canadian Climate Research Network, a network of climate researchers at universities across Canada, on behalf of the Canadian Institute for Climate Studies (CICS), a not-for-profit institute at the University of Victoria.

Previous positions within the public service included Director General for State of the Environment Reporting (SOER), Director General of National Parks, Director General of Weather Services and Director General of Atmospheric Research. As a research scientist from 1969 until 1978, at the "division de recherche en prévision numérique" (RPN) in Montreal and at the European Centre for Medium Range Forecast (ECMWF) in the UK, he pioneered the development of methods to assimilate meteorological data into weather prediction models using three-dimensional optimum interpolation of prediction errors.

He has served on numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE) of the World Climate Research Program in the '80s and the Science Advisory Board for the Great Lakes Section of the International Joint Commission (SAB-IJC) in the'90s. While with National Parks he raised the importance of park science and ecological integrity. At SOER he directed the production of "The State of Canada's Environment 1996" as well as a series of Environmental Indicator reports. Following retirement he contributed a chapter to "Sustainability Indicators: A Report on the Project on Indicators of Sustainable Development" published by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE).

Long involved with CMOS, he was on the executive of the Montreal Centre in the late 60's and served as editor of Atmosphere (the predecessor of Atmosphere-Ocean) from 1973 to 1976. He has served on the Council and Executive of both CMOS and the American Meteorological Society. As President of CMOS in 1999-2000, he oversaw the establishment of the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) as a "child" of CMOS and was its interim board chair.

Dr. Rutherford is a graduate of the University of Toronto Schools (UTS) in Toronto, received his BSc ('62) and MA ('63) in Physics from the University of Toronto. Following a brief career as a weather forecaster (1963-66) in Goose Bay and Montreal, he earned a PhD in Meteorology from McGill in 1969.

July 2004