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is awarded to
"It is a great honour to receive the CAP Industrial and Applied Physics medal. The range of Physics applications in real-world implementations in engineering, medicine, meteorology, environmental sciences, space research and multiple other areas is huge, and continues to grow every day. I am excited that I have been able to add to this list, and delighted for this recognition of my contributions to society through physics. I am also grateful to Prof. John Debruyn who nominated me, and to my wife Anna who has been my soul-mate and the "wind beneath my wings" over the last 30 years." winner quote
The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2011 CAP Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Industrial and Applied Physics is awarded to Wayne Hocking, University of Western Ontario, in recognition of for his outstanding achievements. Not only has he made significant advances in the science of radar studies of the atmosphere but he has also transformed these into commercial products that have won wide international acceptance. announcement
Dr. Wayne Hocking has made important fundamental advances to radar studies in both atmospheric physics and astronomy, and, through Mardoc, a company established by him and his wife, and its partners, has translated those research advances into successful commercially-sold instruments. He has developed new approaches to data sampling strategies, filtering, and quality control for detection of meteor echoes by radar, leading to an orders-of-magnitude improvement in the meteor detection rate. Meteor measurements by radar can be used not only to determine characteristics of the meteors themselves (entrance speeds, fluxes, and radiant positions), but also to learn about the dynamics of the atmosphere at altitudes of 80 to 100 km. In addition, Hocking has developed new methods for radar determination of atmospheric temperatures and gravity wave momentum fluxes, quantities that could not easily be measured by radar previously. This work led to the development of SKiYMET, a commercial radar system, which provides one of the broadest sets of simultaneous parameter measurements of any upper atmospheric instrument and has become the de-facto standard against which other wind measurement systems are tested. Over 40 SKiYMET systems – representing over $10M in sales – have been sold to government laboratories and research organizations world-wide in the last few years, and SKiYMET radars are now installed at latitudes from 67°S to 80°N. They are used for atmospheric and environmental studies, among other things, and also provide data used in Space Shuttle re-entries. Dr. Hocking has also developed new methods for measuring atmospheric parameters in the troposphere and stratosphere using a new generation of windprofiler radars. These developments have been commercialized as the WindTtracker radar, which is used extensively for meteorological studies. Sales of the WindTtracker radar are in excess of $5M, and include all VHF wind profiler radars systems in Canada. Asteroid 14203 (disovered Dec. 25, 1998) has been named "Hocking" in his honour by the International Astronomical Union (see http://www.astro.com/swisseph/astlist.htm). nominator citation