Australian atmospheric physicist and Emeritus Professor at Murdoch University in Perth, whose work on land use and cloud formation in the Western Australian Wheatbelt is the field evidence behind the Bunny Fence findings on Bioprecipitation. Tom Lyons died in April 2021.
Contribution
Lyons helped establish environmental science at Murdoch in the mid-1970s, starting as a lecturer in Environmental and Life Sciences and later serving as Professor and Executive Dean of the Division of Science and Engineering. His expertise lay in boundary-layer meteorology and air pollution. His consultancy work on boundary-layer meteorology for Perth Airport informed the alignment of its main runway. He became a Fellow of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in 2004, served as president of its Western Australian branch, and received a Special AMOS Award in 2020.
His paper “Clouds prefer native vegetation” (2002) used case studies and climate records from southwest Western Australia, where a vermin fence divides cleared cropland from native vegetation. It found that clearing for agriculture changed albedo, surface roughness and canopy resistance, and that higher albedo over the cleared land limited boundary-layer growth and so reduced convective cloud. Murdoch University records that his field work at Lake King drew international attention in 2007. He co-authored the 2011 modeling study with Udaysankar Nair and others that linked land-cover change to suppressed convection along the west coast trough.
The wiki reads this work as documented evidence that vegetation influences rainfall under specific mesoscale conditions. Murdoch now awards the Tom Lyons Honours Scholarship in Environmental and Conservation Science.
Selected works
- Ma, Y., Lyons, T.J. & Blockley, J. (2001). “Surface influences on the Australian West Coast Trough.” Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 68, 207-217.
- Lyons, T.J. (2002). “Clouds prefer native vegetation.” Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, 80(1-4), 131-140.
- Nair, U.S., Wu, Y., Kala, J., Lyons, T.J., Pielke, R.A. & Hacker, J.M. (2011). “The role of land use change on the development and evolution of the west coast trough, convective clouds, and precipitation in southwest Australia.” Journal of Geophysical Research, 116(D7).
Related pages
Sources
- Murdoch University, “Scholarship established for leading voice in environmental science” (2023)
- Lyons (2002), “Clouds prefer native vegetation,” Murdoch research portal
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using published obituaries, institutional records and published work. Personal circumstances reported in the Murdoch article are left out.