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Science Briefing

In its quarterly meeting 10-12 July, the UCAR Board of Trustees approved the appointments of five NCAR researchers as senior scientists. Chosen from within NCAR to provide the center with long-term scientific leadership, senior scientists are selected on the basis of individual competence in research and in other activities that enhance NCAR's interaction with scientists elsewhere. The position is analogous to that of full professor at a tenure-granting university. The new senior scientists are profiled below. (All photos by Bob Bumpas.)


Grant Branstator, Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD). A member of CGD's Global Dynamics Section, Grant joined NCAR in 1973 and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1982. Over the past 11 years, five of Grant's papers have been nominated for the NCAR Outstanding Publication Award, including two that received honorable mention. His research interests include the diagnosis, modeling, and theory of low-frequency atmospheric variability and extended-range prediction. Grant is a professor on Iowa State University's collaborative faculty, where he has served since 1985. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel for the U.S. Global Ocean- Atmosphere-Land Systems Project.


Ying-Hwa (Bill) Kuo, Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division (MMM). Since May 1994, Bill has headed the Mesoscale Prediction Group within MMM. He joined NCAR in 1983 after completing his doctorate in meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. Bill received the 1994 NCAR Outstanding Publication Award (with Richard Reed and Simon Low-Nam). He served as director for the U.S. component of the Taiwan Area Mesoscale Experiment and chaired the 1991 American Meteorological Society Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction. Bill has served as NCAR adviser for more than ten doctoral students since 1988. His research topics include extratropical cyclones, mesoscale numerical weather prediction, mesoscale convective systems, data assimilation, and model initialization.


Michael Knoelker, High Altitude Observatory (HAO). Michael joined NCAR earlier this year to serve as HAO director after a year as an NCAR affiliate scientist. He was a senior astronomer for five years at the Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg, Germany, and taught for five years at the University of Goettingen. He completed his doctorate in 1983 at the University of Freiburg. Michael coorganized the 1993 International Conference on Solar Magnetic Fields at the Kiepenheuer Institute. He has been involved in the development of the data acquisition and computer control systems for the German solar telescopes at Tenerife, Canary Islands, and has chaired the KIS scientific computing group. Michael's research interests include radiative transfer theory, numerical simulations of magnetic flux tubes, and observational studies of magnetoconvection in the solar atmosphere.


Chin-Hoh Moeng, MMM. A specialist in planetary boundary layer (PBL) research in MMM, Chin-Hoh earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1979 and has served on several thesis committees at CSU, CU, Purdue University, Penn State University, and the University of California, Davis. She came to NCAR in 1982 following three years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Chin-Hoh is an associate editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (JAS) and an affiliate faculty member at Colorado State University. She received the NCAR Outstanding Publication award in 1989 and the AMS Editor's Award for JAS in 1993. Her specialties include PBL turbulence transport and stratocumulus clouds, and parameterizations of their effects for general circulation or mesoscale models.


David Schimel, CGD/Climate System Modeling Program. Dave, a specialist in earth systems research, joined UCAR in 1990 and is head of CGD's Ecosystem Dynamics and the Atmosphere Section. He received his Ph.D. at Colorado State University in 1982, where he now serves as an affiliate professor. Dave has been affiliated with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at CSU in various capacities since 1979. He is best known for his work in modeling global ecosystem-atmosphere interactions and as a participant in several major field campaigns. He is the author of Theory and Applications of Tracers, a text on experimental isotopic techniques, and the coeditor of the Dahlem Conference Report, "Exchange of Trace Gases Between Terrestrial Ecosystems and the Atmosphere." A lead author on the 1994 and 1995 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dave serves on the National Research Council Committees on Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Change Research.

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Edited by Bob Henson, bhenson@ucar.edu
Last revised: Wed Mar 29 17:33:36 MST 2000