Keith Raphael Briffa (27 December 1952[3] – 29 October 2017[4]) was a climatologist and deputy director of the Climatic Research Unit.[2] He authored or co-authored over 130 scholarly articles, chapters and books.[5] In his professional work, he focused on climate variability in the late Holocene, with a special focus on northern portions of Europe and Asia. Briffa's preferred method was dendroclimatology, which is a set of procedures intended to decode information about the past climate from tree rings. Briffa helped develop data sets from trees from Canada, Fennoscandia, and northern Siberia which have been used in climate research.[6][7]

Keith Briffa
Born(1952-12-27)27 December 1952
Died29 October 2017(2017-10-29) (aged 64)
Alma materUniversity of East Anglia
SpouseSarah Raper[2]
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of East Anglia
ThesisTree-climate relationships and dendroclimatological reconstruction in British Isles (1984)
Doctoral advisorTom Wigley[1]

Briffa grew up in Speke, and attended St Francis Xavier's College, Liverpool. He studied biological sciences at the University of East Anglia.[2] He completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia entitled "Tree-climate relationships and dendroclimatological reconstruction in British Isles" in 1984.[1]

From 1994 to 2000, Briffa served on the scientific steering committee (SSC) of the PAGES project; more recently he also served on SSCs for the UK NERC Rapid Climate Change and the European Science Foundation's HOLIVAR program.

Briffa served as Lead Author on chapter 6 (Paleoclimatology) of working group I of the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Briffa previously served as associate editor of the scholarly journals The Holocene, Boreas and Dendrochronologia.[8]

He had an h-index of 81 according to Semantic Scholar.[9]

Keith Briffa died in 2017 after a number of bouts of cancer.[2]

Selected publications

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References

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  1. ^ a b Briffa, K. R. (1984). Tree-climate relationships and dendroclimatological reconstruction in British Isles. British Library EThOS (Ph.D). Retrieved 8 October 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d Atkinson, Tim (2017-12-21). "Keith Briffa obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 2017-12-21.
  3. ^ "Memorial to Keith Raphael Briffa, 1952 - 2017". keithraphael-briffa.muchloved.com. Archived from the original on 2020-01-11.
  4. ^ "Professor Keith Briffa". Climatic Research Unit News/Events. University of East Anglia. 2017-11-01. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
  5. ^ "Items where Author is "Briffa, Keith" - UEA Digital Repository". Archived from the original on 7 Nov 2017.
  6. ^ "Staff - UEA - Professor Keith Briffa - Overview". Archived from the original on 9 Oct 2016.
  7. ^ Osborn, Timothy J; Jones, Philip D; Cook, Edward R (2018). "In Memoriam: Keith R Briffa, 1952–2017" (PDF). The Holocene. 28 (10): 1549–1553. Bibcode:2018Holoc..28.1549O. doi:10.1177/0959683618782591. S2CID 134882830.
  8. ^ "Staff - UEA - Professor Keith Briffa - Research". Archived from the original on 9 Oct 2016.
  9. ^ "K. Briffa". Semantic Scholar. Retrieved 30 August 2021.
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