JEDDAH: One of the world’s leading climate change research units in the UK has awarded a prestigious fellowship to Dr. Mansour Almazroui, a faculty member at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah.

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich awarded the Saudi academic the position, entitled CRU Associate Fellow and UEA Non-Stipendiary Visiting Fellow, in recognition for his Ph.D. research.

The position runs through until the end of 2009. Almazroui is a member of the academic staff at KAU’s Faculty of Meteorology, Environment and Arid Land Agriculture.

Professor Abdullah Omar Bafeel, vice president of higher education and scientific research at KAU, praised the award and said that KAU looked forward to this association with UEA as “it offered the means for KAU to become a leader in climate change research on a national and regional scale through cooperation with international universities and research centres across the world.”

This award represents an unprecedented achievement for KAU given the international position of CRU, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

CRU was established in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA in 1972. Founding Director Hubert H. Lamb’s view that the climate was undergoing major anthropogenic changes ran counter to the academic axiom that the world’s climate was constant with only short-term variations.

CRU consists of a staff of around 30 research scientists and students, and has developed several of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models. It is seen as an authoritative source of information in both the science and policy aspects of climate change by the media, and maintains a high public profile.

CRU’s focus is to improve scientific understanding in three areas: climate history and its impact on humanity; the course and causes of climate change during the present century and the prospects for the future.