Oral Histories

The Research and Development behind the Modernization of NOAA's National Weather Service

In the 1980s and 1990s, NOAA completed the largest modernization and restructuring in National Weather Service (NWS) history, to improve the quality and reliability of NOAA products and services for the protection of life and property and the economic well being of the nation.

The foundation of today's National Weather Service was built upon decades of research which continues to yield incremental and often dramatic improvements to forecast and warning accuracy and timeliness. The NWS modernization combined advances in satellite instrumentation; Doppler radar; automated observing systems; supercomputers and numerical modeling; interactive forecast data display systems; automated communications systems; forecasting and warning decision making; and improved public warning dissemination systems.

These oral histories preserve the memories, achievements, and lessons learned, of active and retired experts and leaders whose work contributed greatly to the modernization and restructuring of NOAA's National Weather Service.


	Carl S. Bullock, former Meteorologist with the Forecast Systems Laboratory AWIPS Development Interview conducted June 2010 Topics: PROFS, AWIPS Requirements, the people behind AWIPS and the modernization On the huge list of AWIPS performance requirements: "We still have those old requirements documents. And uh...they eventually ended up being what we ended up calling the 'twenty-two thousand shalls.' So, the system shall do this and shall do that." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 1:04:36 Size: 60MB
	Mary M. Glackin, NOAA Deputy Under Secretary, former AWIPS Program Manager Interview conducted June 2010 Topics: PROFS, AWIPS, long view of the NWS Modernization On the importance of having a clear vision for a program: "'I think one of the guiding things about the modernization was a very clear vision of what you're trying-what we were trying to accomplish. And we really had a mantra, which is-was you know, improve services to do that, by bringing together technology, improving the skill sets of our personnel, to be able to do that and improving observing capacity. So all of those pieces were in there and I think it really was the ingredients I think for a good program." Regarding the contributions and involvement of field office staff in the modernization: "I probably can't say enough about how fabulous the Weather Service Field Office staff was throughout the whole modernization. They were incredibly accepting of new technology that wasn't perfect and really good at making it better. Whatever we gave them, they would be adjusting and coming back with great suggestions on that. So you hear a lot of times about people not being willing to accept new technology, this was the exact opposite. They were hungry for the technology and from a systems development point of view, that made it so easy, so easy to move forward." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 15:20 Size: 14MB
	Douglas H. Sargeant, former Director, NWS Headquarters Office of Systems Development Interview conducted August 2010 Topics: GARP, Development of observational technologies, NWS Modernization Systems Development On the collaboration between researchers and operational meteorologists: "It's at least as hard to get research meteorologists to understand and be interested in operational problems as it is the other -- other way. But by and large, the people in the old ERL, they had any interest in operations. And they did want to learn about and try to help and make contributions too. And so it was always good to do those, marriages." "When we restructured the Weather Service, one of the ideas that Hallgren and I and Bonner pushed relentlessly was this idea of having a research-oriented scientist in the field office. And of having you know, that orientation there. So there was a position dedicated to that in every one of the WFOs." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 1:37:25 Size: 150MB
	Louis J. Boezi, former Deputy Assistant Administrator for Modernization, National Weather Service Interview conducted May 2010 Topics: AFOS, AWIPS, NEXRAD, Transitioning to new technologies On giving forecasters opportunities to try equipment under development to build demand: "There was a sense of pride and can-do and we can get this done, because they knew that these tools were helpful to them. And once that was the case, the demand- pull was just fantastic." Regarding the unique for the time process used by the Forecast Systems Laboratory and NWS: "They pioneered a rapid prototyping methodology in this process that was really unheard of. However, to this day, is more practiced than any other approach." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Part 1 Transcript Part 1 Format: MP3 Run time: 1:01:58 Size: 57MB Part 2 Format: MP3 Run time: 1:03:22 Size: 88MB Part 3 Outtakes Format: MP3 Run time: 25:32 Size: 23MB
	Dennis S. Walts, former NWS Meteorologist assigned to the Forecast Systems Laboratory AWIPS Development Team Interview conducted June 2010 Topics: PROFS, AWIPS, Role of Research Regarding the challenge of bringing diverse environmental data sets into AWIPS: "We worked with so many different people and organizations that the coordination of that was probably the biggest challenge… It was a interesting challenge to do all of that coordination...make sure that in fact the datasets that we were getting were essentially going to be part of the modernization. That the interfaces we were building were going to interface to the real datasets and that we could – the real challenge was so many of the pre-AWIPS datasets were on their own scales, their own coordinate systems. You know...everything was different." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 40:35 Size: 38MB


	Mark E. Brown, Chief Financial Officer, OAR, former U.S. Department of Commerce Budget Office Interview conducted August 2010 Topics: Dept. of Commerce Budget for Modernization, educating Hill staffers On the approach to clearly defining what the Modernization was meant to accomplish: "I always like to quote Dick Hallgren on this. He used to say 'if we can agree on the policy on this we ought to be able to work through the details of it.' And I think that's what we did right early on, was to get policy directions set. So then it was a matter of what the market could afford and how fast we could move as opposed to trying to pick a new direction each time. And that certainly wasn't easy, but it was worth it and great to see the result." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 27:03 Size: 280MB
	Elbert W. “Joe” Friday, Jr., former NOAA Assistant Administrator for Weather Services/Director, National Weather Service Interview conducted January 2010 Topics: NWS Modernization Process, NEXRAD, AWIPS, Restructuring Field Offices On the National Weather Service decision to develop a program to verify forecast and warning accuracy: "In 1982, we started a program called 'the automated verification program', in which we started keeping track of every warning and forecast that went out of the National Weather Service. We did that before the law actually required the non-degradation of services determination, but we realized that we were going to have to show people that we weren't causing problems as we went through the modernization, so this began to serve as a baseline. Before we closed the old offices, we had to show that we weren't lowering the level, and so that worked out very well for us… The fact that we had that track record all the way from 1982, and we started putting in the new offices in 1989 to 1990, that increased the credibility when we made a statement that we weren't degrading services, we actually had the data to show it." On the paradigm shift from national/regional forecasting to local-scale weather forecasting: "We were looking at meso-scale forecasting for the first time, and there had been a lot of work done in the previous decade on understanding meso-scale systems, and understanding that more often. But it was only by having a professional meteorologist at each one of the 125 offices across the country, covering that local region around that office that permitted the application then of this emerging understanding of meso-scale meteorology to be taking place." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 47:06 Size: 43MB
	Alexander E. “Sandy” MacDonald, NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, former Director, Forecast Systems Laboratory Interview conducted October 2010 Topics: PROFS, AWIPS, NWS Modernization R&D On the partnership between research and operations: "You had this coming together of two parts of NOAA. One of them is the research part saying, 'we want to help you build this' and one is the operational part, where you have a visionary and leader like Dick Hallgren who knows the system and says, 'I want to build a National Weather Service that is modernized and uses all the data in the right way and what I expect to get out of this is a big improvement in our ability to put out weather warnings.' And nobody can argue with that. That's clearly a government function, protect the people." "The operational side, I think needs the research side to have a vision of new things and we even see that today. I think we have a vision of what the weather service could be in 2025 and 2030." On the approach of building early prototypes: "We're going to build a version of this system that, even in the first year it really is pretty limited and it isn't anything like what we ultimately want. We're going to actually get software people and build one. Nowadays that's called rapid prototyping and I think it's the absolute key to the fact that we really progressed pretty fast." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 50:28 Size: 47MB
	Robert J. Serafin, Director, National Center for Atmospheric Research and former Chairman, National Academy of Sciences NWS Modernization Committee Interview conducted June 2010 Topics: National Academy of Science’s NWS Modernization Committee, NEXRAD, ASOS, AWIPS, GOES On the importance of having an independent oversight committee of experts "I don't know what was spent on the committee... I assume probably a million a year or something for ten years, a relatively small investment in comparison to what the Weather Service was going to spend on modernization. But I think it paid off. And one of the reasons it's paid off is because of the continuity. The people who were on that committee were really committed. They came to the meetings. They had an interest in what was going on. They knew technically and scientifically what was going on. We had people who understood the human relations, the employee relations part of it. The committee was strongly committed to human engineering to be sure that the systems that were going to be procured were actually going to do the job and be useful to the engineers, scientists, meteorologists. We had a lot of interactions with the operational people. So something like that, that kind of a committee has a lot of value." LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Transcript Format: MP3 Run time: 46:45 Size: 43MB