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December 2004 - January 2005
The
2004 Outstanding Accomplishment Awards
The December 10 all-staff party at the Mesa Lab, sponsored
by the Employee Activities Committee, continued the tradition
of ringing in the holidays while recognizing the outstanding
work of employees.
A total of 12 nominations, consisting of a record 69 individuals,
were nominated for this year’s Outstanding Accomplishment
Awards. UCAR president Rick Anthes emphasized that all the
nominees were to be congratulated on their achievements.
The nominations “represent a tremendous dedication
by our excellent staff to the goals and missions of our institution,” he
said.
He also thanked the divisions and programs for nominating
staffers engaged in outstanding work, as well as the jurors
for their difficult task of choosing among stellar nominees.
This year’s awards included a new category: Mentoring.
It honors “exemplary and sustained mentoring efforts
that directly enhance one or more persons’ career development,” according
to UCAR’s Employee Recognition Awards Policy (see Procedures
for the Outstanding Accomplishment Awards).
“A member from last year’s jury suggested the
award,” Rick explained. “Given the importance
and emphasis on mentoring at UCAR/NCAR/UOP, the President’s
Council agreed and strongly endorsed the creation of this
new award.”
The holiday party began with a performance by a classical
flute quartet that included RAL’s Becky Ruttenberg
on viola and COSMIC’s Maggie Sleziak on violin. After
Rick announced the award winners, staffers enjoyed an excellent
buffet provided by Event Services while listening to the
music of the Sweat Brothers, a local band.
Winners of the UCAR Outstanding Accomplishment
Awards for 2004. Front row (left to right): Chin-Hoh Moeng,
Sonja Stevenson, Lucy Warner, Jim Wilson, Anatta, Nita
Razo, Carlye Calvin. Second row: Nicole Gordon, Mike Shibao,
Jeff Weil, Tom Horst, Peter Sullivan. Third row: David
Hosansky, Bob Henson, Yvonne Mondragon, Zhenya Gallon,
John Michelakes. Back row: Katy Schmoll, Tim Killeen, Rick
Anthes.
Following are the nominees and winners in the four categories
in which awards were given. There were no awards this year
in UCAR’s highest award category, that of Distinguished
Achievement, or in the Administrative Achievement category.
Education and Outreach
The winners were Anatta, Bob Henson, Carlye Calvin, Zhenya
Gallon, Nicole Gordon, David Hosansky, Yvonne Mondragon,
Nita Razo, Sonja Stevenson, and Lucy Warner (Communications)
and Mike Shibao (Imaging and Design Center), for consistent,
award-winning work in publicizing achievements of UCAR, NCAR,
and the atmospheric sciences for broad audiences ranging
from the community to the public.
In the past five years, the Communications team has
been honored with six international awards for its publications
and two awards for videos, and
its ClimateStock video footage has
been cited as a best practice in science communication.
UCAR Highlights is one of the award-winning
products produced by the UCAR Communications office.
“This award recognizes their substantive efforts, and
success, in communicating effectively with NCAR and UCAR’s
many complex constituencies, ranging from the member universities
and collaborators to staff, the media, and all levels of the
general public,” Rick said. “The UCAR Communications
activities are regarded as role models for others and are the
envy of many in the community.”
Also nominated:
• Jennifer Bergman, Marlene DiMarco, Lisa Gardiner, Julia
Genyuk, Sandra Henderson, Marina Lagrave, Randy Russell (EO),
Ryan Deardorff (DLESE), Andrei Rodionov (SCD), and Mike Shibao
(Imaging and Design Center), for their combined efforts to
bring the Windows to the Universe project to UCAR. They completed
a comprehensive revision and update of the Web site interface,
developed new tools to automate and facilitate the work of
contributors, translated the Web site into Spanish, and provided
training to teachers on the use of these resources. The nomination
also cites consultants Eduardo Araujo and David Mastie.
• Pat Parrish, Dwight Owens, Vickie Johnson, Steve Deyo,
Heidi Godsil, Carl Whitehurst, and Seth Lamos of COMET, for
developing Hurricane Strike!, an award-winning multimedia Web-based
module that increases community awareness of the dangers
of and preparations for landfalling hurricanes. Team members
carefully designed this module to be an integral part of the
middle school science curriculum with the intention of targeting
a wider audience, as the students would bring the information
to their families and possibly other members of the community.
Mentoring
Jim Wilson (EOL/RAL) won for providing meaningful mentorship
to a broad range of people, from junior and senior scientists,
administrators, and engineers to various levels of students.
Jim transcends cultural, gender, job classification,
divisional, institutional, and national boundaries to identify
and encourage the special talents of others.
Jim Wilson (EOL/RAL), who won the Outstanding
Accomplishment award for Mentoring, is shown here helping
Latin American forecasters at a nowcasting workshop in Brazil.
(Photo by Ian Bell, Bureau of Meteorology Training Centre,
Australia.)
“As chief scientist of the S-Pol radar and a world leader
in nowcasting convection, Jim’s willingness to guide
budding scientists during field work is continuing to have
a profound and lasting impact on many scientists at NCAR and
elsewhere in the UCAR community,” Rick said. “Repeatedly,
Jim has gone above and beyond the scope of his supervisory
role and mentored a wide range of people whom he does not supervise.”
Also nominated:
• Chris Snyder (MMM), for his exceptional mentoring of
postdoctoral researchers, early career scientists, and graduate
students.
Outstanding Publication
The winners were Thomas Horst (EOL) and Don Lenschow, Chin-Hoh
Moeng, and Peter Sullivan
The HATS project used horizontal arrays of sonic
anemometers, which
collected wind turbulence data in California’s
Central Valley. (Photo
by Steve Semmer, EOL.) |
(all of MMM), for their work on
two articles, “HATS: Field observations to obtain spatially
filtered turbulence fields from crosswind arrays of sonic
anemometers in the atmospheric surface layer” (published
in 2004 in Journal of the Atmospheric
Sciences, 61, 1566–1581)
and “Structure of subfilter-scale fluxes in the atmospheric
surface layer with application to large-eddy simulation modeling” (published
in 2003 in Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 482, 101–139).
The team carried out the Horizontal Array Turbulence Study
(HATS) in 2000 to obtain a data set to investigate how well
parameterizations of small-scale (sub-filter scale, or SFS)
turbulence processes used in large-eddy simulation models
replicate observations in the planetary boundary layer. These
two papers, which document the success of the 2000 field
deployment, show the application and limitations of current
SFS models and point to the need for new SFS models to bridge
the gap between ensemble-averaged turbulence and classical
SFS parameterizations. The award also includes co-authors
J. Kleissl, C. Meneveau, and M.B. Parlange, who were at Johns
Hopkins University at the time the article was published,
and J.C. Weil of CU/Cooperative Institute for Research in
the Environmental Sciences.
The jurors, Rick explained, felt this work merited the award
for two reasons. First, it advanced the problem of simulating
turbulent flows at high Reynolds numbers, which is critical
to many fields of research within NCAR. Second, the scientists
demonstrated originality and creativity in devising and executing
HATS. They interpreted the experimental data in a way that,
according to one of the endorsing letters, “is brilliant
both for its simplicity and for its power to capture the
fundamental physics. The concepts make the results instantly
understandable.”
Also nominated:
• Todd Lane, Bob Sharman, Terry Clark, and Hsiao-Ming
Hsu (RAL), for the article, “An investigation of turbulence
generation mechanisms above deep convection” (published
in 2003 in Journal of the Atmospheric
Sciences, 60, 1297–1321).
The article addresses two fundamental issues in atmospheric
science that can affect aviation: the processes underlying
the generation of gravity waves by cumulus convection (which
can induce strong turbulence close to the tops of clouds),
and the effects of lower-stratospheric gravity wave breaking
on mixing and stratosphere-troposphere exchange.
• Wen-Chau Lee (EOL), who co-authored “Tropical
cyclone kinematic structure retrieved from single Doppler radar
observations,” appearing in three parts: “Part
1: Interpretation of Doppler velocity patterns and the GBVTD technique” (published
in 1999 in Monthly Weather Review, 127, 2419–2439), “Part
II: The GBVTD-simplex center finding algorithm” (published
in 2000 in Monthly Weather Review, 128, 1925–1936), and “Part
III: Evolution and structure of Typhoon Alex (1987)” (published
in 2000 in Monthly Weather Review, 128, 3892–4001).
This series of papers develops and tests techniques to obtain
estimates of the structure of tropical cyclones from single
Doppler radar systems. The nomination cites Wen-Chau’s
co-authors: Ben Jong-Dao Jou (National Taiwan University),
Frank Marks (NOAA/Hurricane Research Division), Pao-Liang
Chang (Central Weather Bureau, Taiwan), and Shiang-Ming Deng
(Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan).
• David Edwards, Jean-Francois Lamarque, Louisa Emmons,
John Gille, Gene Francis, Merritt Deeter, Juying Warner, Daniel
Ziskin, and Lawrence Lyjak (ACD), for “Tropospheric ozone
over the tropical Atlantic: A satellite perspective” (published
in 2003 in Journal of Geophysical Research, 108,
D8, 4237).
This paper discusses groundbreaking research in which David
Edwards and his colleagues used a suite of satellite measurements
to examine Atlantic tropical tropospheric ozone.
• Gordon Bonan (CGD), for Ecological
Climatology: Concepts and Applications (published in 2002 by Cambridge University
Press).
This book encompasses all aspects of environmental sciences
to present an integrated, multidisciplinary view of terrestrial
functioning in the climate
system and to bridge the gap between atmospheric science
and ecology.
• Hanli Liu and Ray Roble (HAO), for “A study of
a self-generated
stratospheric sudden warming and its mesospheric–lower
thermospheric impacts using the coupled TIME-GCM/CCM3” (published
in 2002 in Journal of Geophysical Research, 107, D23, 4695).
A stratospheric sudden warming (SSW) is a dramatic event
in the winter middle atmosphere that involves profound changes
in temperature, wind, and circulation in a short period of
time. This paper studies the response of the atmosphere to
a spontaneously generated SSW, and it represents the first
attempt to link the atmosphere globally in an exploratory
manner to determine how a self-consistent model of the entire
atmosphere would behave.
Scientific and Technical Advancement
John Michalakes (MMM) won for his pioneering work in developing
the software infrastructure for the Weather Research and
Forecasting (WRF) modeling system. John led the design and
implementation of the WRF Advanced Software Framework, which
provides the foundation for all features and capabilities
in the WRF system. WRF offers advanced capabilities for the
research and operational communities.
This is a still image from a WRF moving-nest
simulation of Hurricane Ivan. See the WRF
animation of the hurricane on the web, (Image
courtesy David Gill and Kris Conrad, MMM.)
“John combined solid software engineering design principles
and hard work to form the base of the WRF modeling system,” Rick
said. “His design, particularly with regard to dynamic
parallel processing code generation, has allowed scientists
to focus more fully on their field of science and less on the
field of computer science and thus should considerably
benefit the atmospheric science community.”
The judges also noted the widespread impact of John’s
work: there are thousands of registered WRF users throughout
the world, including the National Weather Service. The Air
Force Weather Agency will soon be using it.
Also nominated:
• George Carr, Brian Eaton, Brian Kauffman, Erik Kluzek,
Sylvia Murphy, Nancy Norton, Mat Rothstein, Julie Schramm,
Mariana Vertenstein, and Wei Yu (CGD) and Tom Henderson (now
with MMM), for the Community Climate System Model, Version
3.
The latest version of the climate
model includes major improvements
in the physics and software that significantly expand its
range of scientific applications.
• Bill Mahoney, Bill Myers, Ben Bernstein, Jim Cowie,
Jamie Wolff, Jaimi Yee, Seth Linden, Arnaud Dumont, and Paddy
McCarthy (RAL), for the development of the Maintenance Decision
Support System. This tool, which aims to improve the safety
and efficiency of winter road maintenance operations, provides
transportation managers with recommendations on road maintenance,
as well as anticipated consequences of action or inaction.
• Shane Mayor, Scott Spuler, Bruce Morley, Eric Loew,
Tim Rucker, Charlie Martin, Jack Fox, Steve Rauenbuehler, and
Karl Schwenz (EOL), for the development of the Raman-shifted
Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL). During two years of development,
the team has applied novel techniques and overcome formidable
obstacles to produce an eye-safe design and relatively high
laser power per pulse that provides a flexibility unique in
lidar systems.
• Steve Chiswell, Steve Emmerson, Linda Miller, Mike Schmidt,
and Tom Yoksas (Unidata), for the development and deployment
of the Local Data Manager, Version 6. This software has significantly
improved the way near real-time data is delivered to researchers,
educators, and operational organizations. •
On the Web
Procedures for the Outstanding Accomplishment Awards
Past Outstanding Accomplishment winners
Also in this issue...
Prospecting
for ice
Recollections
from a pioneering woman scientist
IMAGe comes
into focus
Native
American visitors
Turning
off the juice
Delphi
questions
Happy
Holidays!
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