Scientia Professor in the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW Sydney and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, whose research concerns how land surface processes are represented in global and regional climate models. Andy Pitman directed the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes until it closed in December 2025.
Contribution
Pitman studied physical geography at the University of Liverpool (BSc 1985) and completed his PhD there in 1988 on a new land surface scheme for general circulation models. His work examines the limits of model accuracy for land processes, what those limits mean for projections of carbon and water, and how businesses can use climate information responsibly. He chairs Australia’s National Committee for Earth System Science, serves as a commissioner on the NSW Net Zero Commission, and is a non-executive director of Risk Frontiers.
His 2004 study with Gemma Narisma, Roger Pielke and Neil Holbrook used high-resolution simulations of southwest Western Australia to test the effect of land clearing on regional climate. The simulations reproduced the observed pattern of less rain over the cleared southwest and more inland, and attributed most of the change to reduced surface roughness after clearing. The research brief draws on this study for the estimate that land-use change may account for up to half of the region’s observed rainfall decline. These are model results, and the wiki reads them alongside the field evidence from Tom Lyons and the modeling of Udaysankar Nair.
Selected works
- Pitman, A.J. (2003). “The evolution of, and revolution in, land surface schemes designed for climate models.” International Journal of Climatology, 23, 479-510.
- Pitman, A.J., Narisma, G.T., Pielke, R.A. & Holbrook, N.J. (2004). “Impact of land cover change on the climate of southwest Western Australia.” Journal of Geophysical Research, 109(D18), D18109.
Related pages
Sources
- Staff profile, UNSW Sydney
- Team profile, Risk Frontiers
- Pitman et al. (2004), Macquarie University research record
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using public institutional profiles and published work. Public roles and publications only.