NUS Professor Matthias Roth from the Department of Geography at NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has clinched the 2023 Masatoshi Yoshino Award conferred by the Association of Japanese Geographers for his outstanding contributions to international urban climatology research. An award ceremony and commemorative lecture will be held later in 2024 in Japan.

The annual award, named after eminent Japanese physical geographer and climatologist Masatoshi Yoshino, is presented to mid-career or senior geographers who have achieved outstanding results in climatology in the following sub-fields of geographical climatology or climate geography: microclimatology; historical climatology; disaster climatology; climate change; and climatology related to human activities, monsoons, or geoecology.

Prof Roth joined NUS in 1999 and has taught courses on urban climate, weather and climate, environmental modelling and research methods in environmental sciences. His research seeks to understand how land-use changes affect local climates with a focus on cities and the role they play in climate change, as well as the application of such knowledge to climate sensitive urban design. As an experimental researcher he has conducted observations of urban heat islands, energy balance, carbon dioxide fluxes and fundamental turbulence properties in cities located in North America, Europe and Asia. Prof Roth is the Principal Investigator of the Urban Climate Lab located in the Department of Geography.

“I am very grateful to the Association of Japanese Geographers for recognising my research on urban climates with the Yoshino award. At the same time I am also thankful to my colleagues for their support over the years. I look forward to continue to contribute to new knowledge related to climate change and urbanisation, the two global megatrends that transform human life,” he said.