Don Hillger was part of a Group Achievement Award presented to the GOES-N Series Team by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in April. The award was recognition "for providing the next generation of advanced weather satellites, a service essential to the Nation." Hillger coordinated the GOES-13 Science Test, which occurred at the end of Post Launch Testing for GOES-13 in December 2006, and was assisted by many other scientists who analyzed the data from GOES-13, whose efforts were complied into NOAA Technical Report NESDIS 125, available at http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/projects/goes_n/.
The following CIRA researchers (along with their federal colleagues) were recognized with a Certificate of Appreciation at the GSD "Town Hall" meeting on April 16 for their contributions to the integrated demonstration of GSD global modeling (Flow-following finite-volume Icosahedral Model - FIM), supercomputing, data management, and information systems efforts for Mary Glackin (NOAA Deputy Under Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere) during her visit to ESRL on March 6.
Setting Up Real-Time FIM Runs on wJet and Getting Output on /public in a Timely Manner - Bob Lipschutz (Coordination of Team Activities), Paul Hamer, Patrick Hildreth, and Chris MacDermaid
FIM Code Management with Subversion and GForge / Allowing Well-Controlled Frequent Changes to FIM from Developers - Tom Henderson and Richard Ryan Actual Code Developers for FIM Model and Post-Processing / Many Key Changes Over a Three-Week Period - Jacques Middlecoff and Ning Wang
FIM Display Capabilities on Science On a Sphere® - Steve Albers, Mike Biere, and Jebb Stewart
FIM Display Capabilities Using ALPS - Tom Kent
FIM Display Capabilities for Hall Display - Kevin Brundage and Brian Jamison
Graeme Stephens received an Exceptional Public Service Medal at an award ceremony held at JPL July 23, 2008. He was honored for his exceptional scientific leadership of the CloudSat Project and for his visionary promotion of combined active and passive measurements for atmospheric science. This is a prestigious NASA award that is presented to a number of carefully selected individuals and teams who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the NASA mission.
Phil Partain also received an Exceptional Public Service Medal for his unique contributions to the CloudSat mission. Phil began his association with the CloudSat mission in 2000, when he was assigned to develop the Level 2 science data processing infrastructure for the CloudSat data processing center. Phil combined an existing university prototype with numerous innovations of his own to develop an advanced Level 2 processing system that has been recognized as state of the art by experts from JPL, GSFC, and LaRC.
The IAMAS International Radiation Commission (IRC) selected Graeme Stephens as the awardee of an IRC Gold Medal. This medal is given to a world’s key scientist who made a great contribution to the radiation community. Graeme was invited to speak at the International Radiation Symposium 2008 and receive his pure gold medal at that time.
"A measure of the effectiveness of a research organization is the number and quality of its scientific publications. The Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards were established to recognize the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Federal employees, and Cooperative Institute (CI) scientists associated with OAR who published outstanding scientific peer-reviewed research papers, review papers, books, monographs, and chapters of books that have contributed to or contain the results of research sponsored by OAR.
I would like to congratulate you on the excellent science conducted by ESRL GSD and notably acknowledge the work of Tracy Lorraine Smith, Stanley G. Benjamin, Seth I. Gutman, and Susan Sahm on the "Short-range Forecast Impact from Assimilation of GPS-IPW Observations into the Rapid Update Cycle", Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 135, C03S90, doi: 10.1175/MWR3436.1. This paper was deemed to be one of the most original, important, useful, and best written, by a team of reviewers and has been awarded the 2008 OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Award. We received many excellent papers this year and congratulate your Laboratory and the work of your scientists on their efforts towards this accomplishment." ---Richard Spinrad
"Congratulations to Tracy Smith, Stan Benjamin, Seth Gutman, and Susan Sahm of GSD for having been awarded the 2008 OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Award. This is one of three papers that we submitted for consideration, and two of the three were awarded to GSD scientists. This is truly a remarkable achievement for GSD!" ---Steve Koch
This paper describes the results of experiments on the improvement of weather model forecasts using GPS integrated precipitable water (GPS-IPW). It uses an innovative evaluation technique, and is particularly broad in the duration of the study. The Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) hourly data assimilation has already had huge operational significance, and this paper clearly shows that RUC forecasts are improved by assimilation of GPS-IPW observations. This impact of GPS-IPW observations in the RUC is extensive, affecting guidance for forecasters from the National Weather Service forecast offices who use the RUC routinely for short-range guidance, and also for forecasters from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center producing severe weather watches and NOAA Aviation Weather Center for making aviation weather advisories. The published results of this paper have been instrumental in considering NOAA adoption of GPS-IPW observations.
Chris MacDermaid is ITS' nomination for GSD's Team Member of the Month for May 2008. He is recognized for his dedication to providing outstanding customer support as well as his exceptional skills and knowledge of data systems. Chris leads the Data Systems Group (DSG) within ITS. His group works with GRIB, BUFR, GVAR, METAR and other data. Some of the projects supported by Chris' group are MADIS, FSL to GSD Web project, ATAMS, RUC, WRF and FIM.
September 2008 Team Member of the Month - Isidora Jankov, Forecast Applications Branch Dr. Jankov has been a member of FAB for the last three years. After receiving her Ph.D in 2006 at Iowa State University, Isidora joined the staff as a CIRA-supported post-doctoral associate. In October of 2007, she was hired as a CIRA Scientist. Isidora has made valuable contributions to the International H2O project and the Hydometeorological Testbed project in ensemble design and optimization. During her tenure at ESRL, she has published numerous papers as primary and co-author. With the recent departure of Dr. Chris Anderson to Iowa State University, Dr. Jankov has taken on the important role of primary modeler for the branch including configuring the realtime system for this year's HMT and California Department of Water Resources Projects. Dr. Jankov has strong collaborations with other CIRA and CIRES research efforts. She is an absolutely indispensable member of FAB.
Paul Hamer, an employee of CIRA in Boulder, has been instrumental in developing and supporting the Object Data System (ODS) software architecture that underlies the success of the Central Facility data system of the NOAA ESRL Global Systems Division (GSD). As a result of Paul's work, the ODS methods routinely and reliably accommodate ingest data formats such as GOES GVAR, WSR-88D Level-II, GRIB Edition-1 and -2, BUFR and ASCII. Paul's leadership in developing ODS has provided GSD with an asset that is the foundation upon which many of GSD's successful projects rely.
Andrea Schumacher, an employee of CIRA in Fort Collins, worked as part of a NESDIS team on the development and transition of a new operational NESDIS product for estimating the probability of tropical cyclone formation. Andrea took the lead on generalizing the product to include the central and western north Pacific, and at present the final product is in the final stages of transition to NESDIS operations. The NOAA members of the NESDIS team on which Andrea worked, received the NOAA Bronze Medal for their work. (Unfortunately Andrea could not receive this same honor because she was not an employee of NOAA.)
Jeff Smith, an employee of CIRA in Boulder, has significantly impacted the Global Systems Division in respect to web applications, web services,and java programming. He led the design and development of Weather Research and Forecast Domain Wizard, (a graphical tool used to define the spatial domanin needed to run the new WRF Pre-processor System), he helped to design and develop the WRF Portal (a java application which allows users to develop, configure, run, and monitor the execution of complex WRF model workflows), he developed a java training course for the ESRL staff, and he won a web award for his work on Data Locator (a web services based data access and display cabability, which was an inegral part of exploratory work on the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service).
The following nomination for GSD Team Member of the Month - December 2007 comes from Aviation Branch Chief Mike Kraus.
"Sean Madine is GSD's Team Member of the Month for December. We in the Aviation Branch would like to recognize Sean's significant contributions to the Forecast Verification Program. Sean is a key contributor to the success of the Verification Program. He provides programmatic coherence, project leadership and vision, and has infused innovative scientific concepts into the verification and evaluation process. For instance, Sean is leading the design of the next generation RTVS, is developing a significant cutting edge project with Boeing Corporation to understand the economic value of weather forecasts, and is working to extend verification concepts and information for automated decision support."
"Thanks Sean for all you do and congratulations!"
The following nomination for GSD Team Member of the Month – November 2007 comes from Information Systems Branch Chief Carl Bullock.
"I am nominating Leigh Cheatwood-Harris for GSD's November 2007 Team Member of the Month. Leigh has supported a number of important evaluation and training activities in ISB over the past several months. Two of particular note were her work with the AWIPS II development and GFE training for River Forecast Center forecasters.
For AWIPS II, Leigh was persistent in working with the version 1.0 despite many problems typical of a first release of software. She became the de-facto expert on this system helping others learn and use AWIPS II. She also developed test metrics which will be used to evaluate the new AWIPS II system. This development included compiling and evaluating usage logs, interacting with NWS staff at the Boulder forecast office, and running and documenting performance tests. These metrics will form the basis of comparing the performance of the new AWIPS II system.
She has also played a key role for developing and testing training material for initial GFE training conducted with River Forecast Center forecasters from across the nation. She meticulously went through training material before training began and suggested changes to the material in order to make it more meaningful to participants during training. She also assisted during training and answered questions during lab exercises. These contributions helped lead to a successful training experience for the participants, most of whom had little prior experience with the GFE."
Jeff Smith
"Data Locator" Site
This new site provides a search engine for finding GRIB and NetCDF meteorological data here at GSD. Employing a web coverage service (WCS) to return subsets of desired data in NetCDF format, the Data Locator web application can either return this data as a downloaded NetCDF file (.nc), or it can generate web pages for viewing the data in a web browser or from within Google Earth. A web service is also available for other applications to invoke in order to find and retrieve this data.
Patrick Hildreth
"FIDO" - Short for FICS Docs
The GSD ITS Operations staff have long relied upon FICS to assist them in monitoring the various systems in support of the research projects here at GSD/ESRL. "Fido", short for FICS Docs, is an add-on to FICS used to store and manage the detailed information pages associated with these systems. With Fido, operators are now able to edit, add, and delete information pages as well as view an archive of previous versions. The primary users of the system like it so well that they have expressed a desire to move all of their documentation to this new system.
GSD Director Steve Koch stated that:
CSU Professor to Chair Section of National Academy Dr. Tom Vonder Haar, University Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, has been elected Chairman of the Interdisciplinary Section of the National Academy of Engineering. The Academies of Engineering and Science and the Institute of Medicine were founded by President Abraham Lincoln to serve as advisors to the Nation. The Interdisciplinary Section includes 140 Academicians from industry, research laboratories and the university community.
Vonder Haar was named to the Academy in 2003. He joined CSU faculty Larry Roesner, Civil Engineering, George Seidel, Jr., Biomedical Sciences, and Barry Beaty, Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology in this honor. CSU faculty emeritus Jack Cermack and A. Ray Chamberlain, Civil Engineering, with Albert Meyers and Marshall Fixman, Chemistry, are also active members of the Academy.
Please join in congratulating Jebb Stewart and Glen Liston who each were presented the CIRA Research Initiative Award for 2007! This honor acknowledges their contributions to the overall research environment at CIRA. The staff in Boulder gathered to honor Jebb, and we will honor Glen at our next Coffee Confab on August 22.
Jebb was behind the system design and technical leadership necessary in the development of enabling technology for the Gridded FX-Net system. The system has since been adopted by operational fire weather forecasters working for the National Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Interagency Fire Center. The data provided by the system is essential to daily fire prediction forecasts.
Glen is well known among his peers for his innovative blowing snow model. His modeling suite represents a tremendous advance forward in the field, and he has been sought after as a collaborator on a number of projects (including treks across Canada and the Antarctic) both here and abroad. Snow research promises to be a growing area thanks to the expertise and reputation Glen brings to CIRA.
The following nomination comes from Technology Outreach Branch Chief Bill Bendel.
"Mike Biere - Technology Outreach Branch/Science On a Sphere® Senior Software Engineer - is designated as GSD's Team Member of the Month for June 2007. He is receiving this in recognition for superb efforts in furthering the SOS mission. In particular: contributing innovative ideas on improving the current SOS system; continuing to support customers at many sites with real time answers; providing training during the installation of SOS systems at several museums and science centers; developing the software for the five projector configuration for SOS; and interacting with vendors, suppliers, and sphere builders to get the work done right and on time."
Kevin received the award based on his significant participation on the NOAA Research and Development High Performance Computing System Procurement as well as his continuing superior performance on collaborative research with NOAA/RDTL GSD’s Assimilation and Modeling Branch.
Louie Grasso and Manajit Sengupta received the award for their outstanding work on the GOES-R Project.
Dr. Shripad Deo, a CIRA Research Associate based in Kansas City, MO with our National Weather Service Central Region Headquarters colleagues, was recently recognized with a Regional Excellence Award. The focus of Dr. Deo’s research has been in trying to help the NWS communicate with the public more clearly and effectively. In this project, the goal was to develop a web portal that would allow the lay public access to NWS information without being overwhelmed. With help from the webmaster, the project was completed in June of 2006.
The NOAA 2007 Environmental Hero Awards were presented by retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, Ph.D., Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 2007.
Nolan Doesken was one of ten recipients of the prestigious award. "Doesken organized a network of citizen volunteers to measure and report precipitation from their homes following a flash flood that killed five people in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1997. Starting with a few volunteers in 1998, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network involves thousands of volunteers in 17 states, and enhances the forecasting and warning capabilities of the NOAA National Weather Service."
Congratulations go out to Jim Frimel for his selection as one of the recipients of this year's CSU Distinguished Administrative Professional Award. This annual award recognizes administrative professionals for continuing meritorious and outstanding achievement in outreach, teaching, administration and/or research at CSU.
Jim is being recognized for his key leadership of several high visibility research projects, including the FAA- and NWS-sponsored Volcanic Ash Coordination Tool project that recently received the 2006 NOAA Bronze Medal. He was presented his award at the Celebrate Colorado State! Luncheon on April 26 at the Lory Student Center.
Congratulations to Don Reinke on his selection as recipient of this year's College of Engineering Distinguished Administrative Professional Award for his exceptional performance as Leader of the CloudSat Data Processing activity since 2001. CloudSat is a NASA-managed cloud imaging satellite that has been making unique vertical structure measurements since June 2006.
Don was presented his award at the annual College of Engineering Visual Arts and College Awards Reception held April 12th.
Evan Polster was named GSD’s December 2006 Team Member of the Month. Evan serves as the Technology Outreach Branch programmer Analyst for the FX-Net Technology. He was recognized for his outstanding efforts in furthering the FX-Net activities including: contributing innovative ideas on improving recent FX-Net Client updates; working hard to meet many development and software release deadlines; maintaining the Starteam software version control system and the FX-Net group Wiki site; and providing Java development leadership.
On the web: http://www-tod.fsl.noaa.gov/fxnet.htmlAt the annual NWS Incident Meteorologist (IMET) Workshop in Boise, Idaho during the week of March 12, 2007, the National Weather Service Director, Brig. General D.L. Johnson, USAF (Ret.), presented ‘Certificates of Recognition’ to two members of the FX-Net project team. Sher Schranz, Project Manager, and Jebb Stewart, Development Lead, received the award.
"In Recognition of your leadership to ensure operational excellence via innovative development and maintenance of critical software for our IMETS."The National Weather Service has implemented an All Hazards Onsite Meteorological Support System to provide data and communications to the NWS Incident Meteorologists (IMETS) at remote locations. The core component of the system is the NOAA ESRL/GSD’s FX-NET system. FX-NET provides AWIPS-like displays on the IMET laptop while retrieving real-time atmospheric data from remote data servers. 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. FX-Net delivers high-resolution satellite, radar, observational and weather prediction model data utilizing unique compression technology and state of the art, cross-platform display software.
CIRA Research Associate Jeff Smith was recognized at the NOAA/Global Systems Division (GSD) Christmas party this past December (2006) with a web award for "Best New Site." Jeff’s creation, called "JavaZone" was created as a supplement to Jeff’s Java class for the Earth Systems Research Laboratory (NOAA) in Boulder, CO. However, it has taken on a life of its own and become a valuable resource for many GSD developers who weren’t able to take the class. The site is fun, clever and user-friendly. Power Point training slides, Java programming exercises, downloads, links and a "fun stuff" category are all provided on the site. Jeff’s well-designed and well-coded site is GSD’s Best New Site of 2006.
On the web: http://www-ad.fsl.noaa.gov/ac/javazone/Poster Award for Use of WRF Portal to Support the Developmental Testbed Center
The ESRL/Global Systems Division's GPS-Met team received the 2006 Department of Commerce Gold Medal for its development of Global Positioning System (GPS) meteorology, a new low cost, upper-air observing system that uses GPS to continuously measure the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Although only Federal employees are eligible for this award, CIRA Research Associate Tracy Smith was a key member of the team that successfully demonstrated new applications for GPS meteorology that are essential to NOAA's Integrated Earth Observing System/Global Earth Observing System of Systems. Their efforts have advanced weather forecasting, climate monitoring, and atmospheric research by providing a new way to monitor atmospheric water vapor.
Tracy was also one of the coauthors on a paper selected as one of the 2005 OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards announced in June. The award-winning paper, "An Hourly Assimilation-Forecast Cycle: The RUC," was published in Monthly Weather Review. This paper describes the analysis system utilized within the Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) and discusses some issues associated with high-frequency data assimilation cycling. The RUC is an operational NCEP weather forecast system Tracy helped develop as part of the GSD Assimilation and Modeling Branch.
On the web: the website for GPS-Met is http://gpsmet.noaa.gov/jsp/index.jsp
for the RUC (now known as Rapid Refresh) is http://rapidrefresh.noaa.gov/
A copy of the MWR paper can be found at:
http://www-frd.fsl.noaa.gov/pub/papers/Benjamin2004c/j.pdf
Dr. Tom Vonder Haar, University Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of CIRA, has been elected Chairman of the Interdisciplinary Section of the National Academy of Engineering. The Academies of Engineering and Science and the Institute of Medicine were founded by President Abraham Lincoln to serve as advisors to the Nation. The Interdisciplinary Section includes 140 Academicians from industry, research laboratories and the university community.
Vonder Haar was named to the Academy in 2003. He joined CSU faculty Larry Roesner, Civil Engineering, George Seidel, Jr., Biomedical Sciences, and Barry Beaty, Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology in this honor. CSU faculty emeritus Jack Cermack and A. Ray Chamberlain, Civil Engineering, with Albert Meyers and Marshall Fixman, Chemistry, are also active members of the Academy.
A NASA Group Achievement Award was presented to the CSU-CIRA Team comprised of Kenneth Eis, Phil Partain, Dale Reinke, Donald Reinke, Laura Sample, and Michael Hiatt for "exceptional contributions to the CloudSat mission in the design, development and implementation of the CloudSat Data Processing System." CloudSat launched on April 28th, 2006 and the Data Processing Center has processed 100% of the data collected by the instrument since it became operational on June 2nd 2006.
A formal announcement of this award was made at the awards ceremony at JPL on June 21st. Phil Partain traveled to JPL to accept the Award for the DPC. Phil is an employee of Science Technology Corporation, METSAT Division and is working under a subcontract to CIRA as the CloudSat Data Processing Center System Engineering and Operations Manager.