2008 Awards
2008 Stratospheric Ozone Protection Awards
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named David Fahey and John Daniel among the winners of the agency’s 2008 Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award. The Ozone Layer Protection Awards were founded in 1990 to recognize outstanding contributions to the protection of the Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer.
Fahey and Daniel are among the authors of a groundbreaking paper published in 2007 that calculated the benefits to the climate from citizen action and the Montreal Protocol in phasing out ozone-depleting substances that are also powerful greenhouse gases. The team of five scientists found that the direct effect of the Montreal Protocol’s emission reductions has been to delay climate change by 7 to 12 years. The award citation states, “This team reminds us that individuals can make a difference, that confident action can succeed under multilateral agreements like the Montreal Protocol, and that ground-breaking science can guide successful policies.”
Fahey also received an individual award for his work on many aspects of stratospheric ozone depletion and the impact of aviation on ozone and climate. He has served on several international scientific assessments of ozone depletion and climate. Fahey was the lead author of "Twenty Questions and Answers About the Ozone Layer” for both the 2002 and 2006 updates of the Montreal Protocol’s Science Assessment Report.
More information about the EPA Stratospheric Ozone Protection Awards.
Awards 2007
OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards
The Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards were established to recognize the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) researchers who published outstanding scientific peer-reviewed literature. Research conducted through OAR, is a driving force behind environmental products and services that protect life and property and promote sustainable economic growth.
Winners of the 2007 OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards from ESRL include:
- Climate
- Earth System Research Laboratory - Global Monitoring Division
David J. Hofmann, James H. Butler, Edward J. Dlugokencky, James W. Elkins, Kenneth Masarie, Stephen A. Montzka and Pieter Tans. 2006. The role of carbon dioxide in climate forcing from 1979 to 2004: introduction of the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index. Tellus, 58B, 614-619. -
Earth System Research Laboratory - Chemical Sciences Division
Owen R. Cooper, Andreas Stohl, Michael Trainer, Anne M. Thompson, Jacquelyn C. Witte, Samuel J. Oltmans, Gary Morris, Kenneth E. Pickering, James H. Crawford, Gao Chen, Ronald C. Cohen, Timothy H. Bertram, Paul J. Wooldridge, Anne E. Perring, William H. Brune, John Merrill, Jennie L. Moody, David Tarasick, Philippe Nédélec, Gerry Forbes, Michael J. Newchurch, Frank J. Schmidlin, Bryan J. Johnson Solene Turquety, Steven L. Baughcum, Xinrong Ren, Fred. C. Fehsenfeld, James F. Meagher, Nicole Spichtinger, Clyde C. Brown, Stuart A. McKeen, I. Stuart McDermid, and Thierry Leblanc. 2006. Large upper tropospheric ozone enhancements above midlatitude North America during summer: In situ evidence from the IONS and MOZAIC ozone measurement network. Journal Of Geophysical Research, 111, D24S05, doi:10.1029/2006JD007306. - Weather and Water
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Earth System Research Laboratory - Physical Sciences Division
F. Martin Ralph, Paul J. Meiman, Gary A. Wick, Seth I. Gutman, Michael D. Dettinger, Daniel R. Cayan, Allen B. White. 2006. Flooding on California's Russian River: Role of atmospheric rivers. Geophysical Research Letters, 33: L13801, doi: 10.1029/2006GL026689.
Dr. Alexander E. "Sandy" MacDonald 2007 Presidential Rank Award Winner
Each year the President recognizes a distinct group of career Senior Executives with the President's Rank Award for exceptional long-term accomplishments. High-performing senior career employees are strong scientific leaders who achieve results and consistently demonstrate strength, integrity, industry, and a relentless commitment to excellence in public service.
Dr. Alexander E. "Sandy" MacDonald's leadership and success in technology development and transition to operations has helped make NOAA a leader in its operational systems. He is widely regarded as a visionary, who is able to both predict where science and technology are going, and to lead the way in important programs. In the last five years, Dr. MacDonald has made some extraordinary contributions to NOAA and the Nation.
He invented a new display technology, Science On a Sphere, (SOS) that visually displays global data in a truly spectacular way. His new SOS display technology was awarded a patent to the government in 2004. These popular educational systems are now in multiple museums, resulting in the education of hundreds of thousands of people on the workings of the global ocean and atmosphere.
In 2003, when OAR was without an Assistant Administrator, he led and organized a group of laboratory directors to serve as Acting Assistant Administrator (AA) and Deputy Assistant Administrator (DAA), and he served for two months as Acting AA, and another two months as Acting DAA.
Dr. MacDonald chaired the Physical and Social Sciences Task Team (PSTT) group that looked at the entire organizational and geographic structure of NOAA's research, and made recommendations that were unanimously accepted by NOAA's highest level of leadership.
In August of 2006, he became OAR's Deputy Assistant Administrator for Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, and the first Director of Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL).
Explorers Club to Honor Researcher for Climate-Science Breakthroughs
The awards are presented by the president of the Explorers Club to groups of outstanding explorers who have distinguished themselves in a particular field. This year's awards theme is "Exploring Climate Change."
Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., is known for her climate and ozone work, including research that led to determining the chemical cause of the Antarctic "Ozone hole." Her research also helped lay the scientific foundation that led to an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons, which were creating chemical reactions destructive to stratospheric ozone.
NOAA Scientist Awarded EPA 2007 Best-of-the-Best Stratospheric Ozone Protection Awards
Daniel L. Albritton, the former Director of the Aeronomy Laboratory and ESRL Chemical Science Division, and now retired from NOAA, is one of only 31 individuals named as a recipient of the EPA's "2007 Best-of-the-Best Stratospheric Ozone Protection Awards".
The Award distinguishes the highest caliber recipients from over 500 individuals, organizations and teams who have earned annual Stratospheric Ozone Protection awards from 1990 to 2007. Dr. Albritton is honored for conducting path-breaking basic stratospheric research, integrating complex scientific findings, and explaining the science of ozone-layer depletion to policy-makers around the world in user friendly terms, thereby helping them in making well-informed decisions about protecting the ozone layer. He has led as Co-chair of the Montreal Protocol's Scientific Assessment Panel since its inception twenty years ago, communicating science-based information about the ozone layer to the Parties to the Montreal Protocol via the Panel's periodic scientific assessments of ozone depletion. Dr. Albritton received the EPA Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award in 1994.
More information about International Ozone-Layer Assessments.
Susan Solomon Honored as AGU's 2007 William Bowie Medalist
Susan Solomon has been selected as 2007 William Bowie Medalist of the American Geophysical Union. The Bowie Medal is awarded to Dr. Solomon in recognition of her accomplishments on several fronts:
- for her groundbreaking scientific research on the Earth's ozone layer and climate carried out via collaborations with U.S. and international partners;
- for synthesizing this information for the good of humanity via her work in leading the IPCC climate assessment report and in the ozone-layer assessments;
- for her lifelong endeavors to communicate science to educators, the public, and decisionmakers; and
- for her unselfish efforts to foster the next generation of atmospheric scientists.
The Bowie Medal is AGU's highest honor. It was established in 1939 in honor of William Bowie for his "spirit of helpfulness and friendliness in unselfish cooperative research." The award acknowledges an individual for outstanding contributions to fundamental geophysics and for unselfish cooperation in research, one of the guiding principles of AGU. William Bowie was a distinguished geodesist who was not only one of the founders of the American Geophysical Union and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics but was also an architect of international cooperation in geophysical research.
More information about ozone research.
NOAA Scientists Receive EPA Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award
NOAA began monitoring stratospheric ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbon-11 and -12 gases 30 years ago from a globally dispersed network of four atmospheric baseline stations and at a site at Niwot Ridge, Colorado. The network has grown to include over 20 sampling locations and an additional 20 other trace gases of atmospheric interest.
The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has now awarded that team of Steve Montzka, Brad Hall, Jim Butler, and Jim Elkins of ESRL and Geoff Dutton of CIRES the 2007 Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award for "Measuring the effectiveness of the Montreal Protocol in Reducing Chlorine/Bromine Loading and Repairing the Ozone Layer". The award winning team reported the first measured declines in ozone depleting substances (ODS) in the troposphere in response to the controls on the production of these trace gases following the 1987 Montreal Protocol.
More information about ozone-depleting gas measurement research.
FX-Net Project Researchers Honored
Members of the FX-Net project team, Sher Schranz, Project Manager and Jebb Stewart, Development Lead, received awards: "In Recognition of [their] leadership to ensure operational excellence via innovative development and maintenance of critical software for our IMETS", at the annual NWS Incident Meteorologist (IMET) Workshop.
FX-Net is the core component of the NWS All Hazards Onsite Meteorological Support System, which provides real-time data to forecasters working in remote locations. FX-Net has been deployed to hundreds of fires during the last four fire weather seasons, and to other events such as Katrina clean-up support, oil spills and national political conventions.
More information about FX-Net.