Holiday Party: Outstanding!
At this year's all-staff holiday function, held 8 December in the
Mesa Lab lobby, the Outstanding Performance Awards were
complemented by musical and theatrical performances in a rousingly
successful talent show organized by the Employee Activities
Committee.
Hillary Keyes (right) leads a jazz dance that lit up the Mesa
lab mezzanine. (Photos by Carlye Calvin.)
Hillary Keyes (Information Support Services) and Kathy Westphal
choreographed a dance and pantomime to jazz classics "Miss Otis
Regrets" and "It Was Just One of Those Things," as performed by
Kirsty Maccol and the Pogues. Hillary was joined on the ML
mezzanine/stage by Kathy, Gayl Gray (NCAR Library), Rudy Montoya
(NCAR cafeteria), and Janice Bardin. The group was followed by
Steve Emmerson (Unidata), who donned Scottish garb and performed
sing-along numbers on the bagpipe. The show closed with
SpiderHead, a Boulder-based rock group consisting of Jonathan
Smith (RAP), Chuck Hwang (ATD), Todd Loomis, and David Parkin.
Not long after winning an Outstanding Performance Award, Steve
Emmerson returned to the ML stage with bagpipes.
Before the party got underway, NCAR director Bob Serafin had his
work cut out for him. Bob was charged with introducing 74
nominees, including 16 winners, in this year's performance award
line-up. Division and program directors made a record 24
nominations this year in five categories. The winners, chosen by
interdivisional committee, received cash awards and medals. See
the box below for this year's winners. The 1995 nominations are at
the address http://home.ucar.edu/perf/perf95.html. For a complete
round-up from 1967 through this year, check the World Wide Web
address http://home.ucar.edu/perf/perfretro.html --BH
The Winners
Guy Brasseur and Claire Granier, Outstanding
Publication
Honorable mention: Bill Skamarock, Morris Weisman, and Joe
Klemp
Chuck Frush, Peter Hildebrand, Wen-Chau Lee, Eric Loew, Richard
Neitzel, Rick Parsons, Mitch Randall, and Craig Walther,
Technology Advancement
Peggy LeMone, Education
Honorable mention: Ben Domenico
Mitch Baltuch, Glenn Davis, Steve Emmerson, and Robb
Kambic, Technical Support
Greg McArthur, Administrative Support
Outstanding Publication
Nominees for this honor have published, in the past five
years, either results of original work or other contributions,
such as review papers or books, that have increased understanding
of atmospheric science.
Guy Brasseur and Claire Granier (ACD), "Mount Pinatubo
aerosols, chlorofluorocarbons, and ozone depletion," Science
257 (1992), 1239-1242. These authors were the first chemical
modelers to predict the ozone changes that could be expected
following the massive eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Besides estimating
the amount of ozone depletion from purely chemical considerations,
they presented a new mechanism for transient ozone loss in the
tropics. Observations have since proven that both their chemical
and their dynamical ideas were substantively correct.
Wojciech Grabowski (MMM), two papers: "Cumulus entrainment,
fine-scale mixing and buoyancy reversal," Quarterly Journal of
the Royal Meteorological Society 119 (1993), 935-956; and
"Entrainment and mixing in buoyancy reversing convection with
applications to cloud-top entrainment instability," Quarterly
Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 121 (1995), 231-
253. The entrainment of air into clouds is a key issue in studies
of the atmospheric boundary layer. The crux of the problem is what
happens between the microscale and the cloud scale. The
entrainment problem has already been studied by interactively
nested models with a moving domain; this paper takes "the next
important and more difficult step of addressing the fundamental
physics controlling the cloud-environment interactions."
William Large, James McWilliams, and Scott Doney (CGD), "Ocean
vertical mixing: A review and a model with a nonlocal boundary
layer parameterization," Review of Geophysics 32(4) (1994),
363-403. As the title suggests, the paper both reviews previous
work on the subject and offers a new scheme for parameterizing an
ocean boundary-layer model, describing its implementation and
comparing its results with observations. Although this type of
parameterization had been used for the atmospheric boundary layer
before, it had to be extended to encompass the variables
describing ocean buoyancy. The scheme described in the paper has
since been used in three-dimensional ocean circulation models with
considerable success.
Alexander Praskovsky and Steven Oncley (ATD), four papers:
"Measurements of the Kolmogorov constant and intermittency
exponent at very high Reynolds numbers," Physics of Fluids
6 (1994), 2886-2888; "Probability density distribution of
velocity differences at very high Reynolds numbers," Physical
Review Letters 73(25) (1994), 3399-3402; "Correlators of
velocity differences and energy dissipation at very high Reynolds
numbers," Europhysics Letters 28 (1994), 635-640; and "Some
integral range correlators in fully developed turbulence,"
Physical Review E 51(6) (1995), R5197-R5199. The papers
describe the analysis of the authors' unique laboratory and field
observations to examine the nature of fully developed turbulence.
They offer an important advance in using data from a 1990 field
experiment and from the world's largest wind tunnel to shed light
on fundamental issues in modern turbulence theory, with results
presented in a dimensionless form that permits them to be used in
different applications.
David Schimel (ACD), "Terrestrial ecosystems and the carbon
cycle," Global Change Biology 1 (1995), 77-91. An example
of truly interdisciplinary research, this paper builds on an
understanding of both atmospheric processes and terrestrial
ecology and their interactions within the global carbon cycle,
which consists of the fluxes of carbon among its four main
reservoirs: fossil carbon, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the
terrestrial biosphere. In this genre of paper, originality and
creativity are demonstrated by describing the problem in a way
that opens new doors of understanding.
William Skamarock, Morris Weisman, and Joseph Klemp (MMM),
"Three-dimensional evolution of simulated long-lived squall
lines," Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 51 (1994),
2563-2584. Squall lines--long systems of cumulonimbus cells--
produce copious amounts of rain and, frequently, severe weather
such as flash floods and tornadoes. Modelers have traditionally
treated a squall line as an infinitely long line with repeating
characteristics. Mesoscale convective systems are also systems of
cumulonimbus cells, but they are more complex to model because
they are by nature asymmetrical. "By combining a state-of-the-art
gridding technique with the choice of a simple but
meteorologically significant test problem, this paper represents a
major advance. . . ."
James Wilson, Brant Foote, Andrew Crooke, James Fankhauser,
Charles Wade, John Tuttle, Cynthia Mueller, and Steven Krueger
(RAP), "The role of boundary-layer convergence zones and
horizontal rolls in the initiation of thunderstorms: A case
study," Monthly Weather Review 129 (1992), 1785-1815. This
paper combines observations from Doppler radars, aircraft,
atmospheric soundings, and a mesonetwork with cloud photographs
and numerical simulations to describe how various scales of
meteorological phenomena interact to produce thunderstorms. The
findings are important for the short-term forecasting of
thunderstorm activity. Other researchers have since applied these
results to the formation of thunderstorms at the intersections of
sea-breeze fronts and boundary-layer rolls.
Technology Advancement
This award honors major individual or group creations of the
past five years that represent technical achievements in
engineering, computer science, or applied science.
Dan Anderson, Dennis Colarelli, Chris Fair, George Fuentes,
Paul Hyder, Basil Irwin, and John Merrill (SCD); and Bill Boyd,
Dan Hansen, and Jordan Powers (MMM), for their work on the CO-OP
3D project. To explore distributed scientific collaboration using
high-speed communications and to gain experience with new
technology, the group ran two models, an atmospheric forecast
model and a Lake Erie forecast model, distributed between NCAR and
the Ohio Supercomputing Center and linked by high-speed
communications provided by a communications satellite. Among the
results of this effort was the first known numeric weather
prediction via satellite.
The GPS/MET program team: Mike Exner, Doug Hunt, Rick
McCloskey, Suze Peet, and Bill Schreiner (UNAVCO); Da Sheng Feng
and Ben Herman (University of Arizona); Xiaolei Zou (MMM); and Tom
Meehan (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory). The Global Positioning
System/Meteorology experiment, which uses signals from the U.S.
Air Force's 24 GPS navigational satellites to derive temperature
and humidity profiles in the atmosphere, was launched into orbit
on a small satellite last April. Results so far show that the
technique has considerable promise. The GPS/MET team was nominated
for "pioneering efforts" in the design, development, launch, and
operation of the payload and software. The team "has produced a
major breakthrough in remote sensing of the earth's atmosphere
from space."
Mike Exner (second from left), leader of the GPS/MET team, is
flanked by UCAR president Rick Anthes, NCAR director Bob Serafin,
and UOP director Bill Pennell.
Alan Fried, Scott Sewell, and Bruce Henry (ACD) and James
Drummond (University of Toronto) for developing, deploying, and
using a field tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer for
measurements of trace gases in the atmosphere. In field tests it
provided invaluable real-time measurements of tropospheric
formaldehyde. Present in only very small concentrations,
formaldehyde plays a key role in the chemistry controlling the
oxidizing capacity of the troposphere and thus the removal of a
number of important greenhouse gases, such as methane. The team
has compared this new method to other approaches to demonstrate
its superior performance.
Chuck Frush, Peter Hildebrand, Wen-Chau Lee, Eric Loew,
Richard Neitzel, Rick Parsons, Mitch Randall, and Craig Walther
(ATD), for development of the Electra Doppler Radar (ELDORA). The
high-resolution airborne radar has been the most ambitious
instrument development effort ever undertaken at NCAR, and in last
summer's Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes
Experiment it proved itself a resounding success, obtaining
unprecedented images of tornadoes on the U.S. southern plains.
The performance award for technology advancement went to the
ELDORA development team. Pictured (left to right) are chuck Frush,
Peter Hildebrand, Bill Pennell, Eric Loew, Bob Serafin, Rick
Anthes, Mitch Randall, Wen-Chau Lee, Rick Parsons, and Richard
Neitzel. Nto pictured is Craig Walther, who was on duty at the
Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE-1) in Tasmania.
Steve Tomczyk, Kim Streander, Greg Card, David Elmore, and
Howard Hull (HAO), for the design, construction, and successful
operation of HAO's Low Degree Oscillations Experiment (LOWL). The
LOWL's centerpiece instrument, designed in collaboration with
Alessandro Cacciani (University of Rome), observes seismic signals
that propagate through the interior of the sun. From these
observations scientists can infer the physical properties of that
region with greater accuracy than ever before. Insights from the
LOWL are of crucial importance to understanding the origins of
solar magnetism and serve to constrain theoretical models for the
structure, composition, and thermodynamic properties of the solar
interior.
Education
Instituted last year, this award honors the most significant
individual or group achievement in postgraduate, graduate,
undergraduate, K-12, or general public science education,
including such areas as development of programs or curricular
materials in science, mathematics, and technology transfer.
John Clyne and Don Middleton (SCD), for visualization and
Internet data distribution of the National Library of Medicine's
Visible Human Project. The University of Colorado at Denver Health
Sciences Center developed a digital database representing a
complete human adult male. John and Don organized the data,
established an archive, and released the data to the public last
January. They also collaborated with the CU researchers to produce
a pilot movie based on the data set. The images have been
distributed to hundreds of organizations worldwide.
Steve Davis and Linda Carbone (Information and Education
Outreach Program), for developing NCAR's first major traveling
exhibit, "Thunderstorm Detectives." The exhibit describes the
successful application of contemporary science to the real-world
problem of weather hazards to aviation. Because of this exhibit,
which has traveled to museums and airports, literally millions of
people who may not be routinely exposed to science issues have
seen an important example of how public science funding can
directly affect their lives.
Ben Domenico (Unidata), for promoting the educational use of
both meteorological data and Internet technologies in settings
from elementary schools to universities. Ben moderates an
electronic-mail-based discussion group for K-12 teachers in
Colorado, and he has done much volunteer consulting at Boulder
Valley schools. He helped create the Unidata Campus Weather
Display, which he later expanded into the Integrated Earth
Information Server. IEIS had become a template for universities to
use in creating World Wide Web servers that offer weather data.
John Firor (ASP), for his 15-year leadership in education as
head of ASP. John has used ASP to increase diversity among the
atmospheric sciences community; for example, of 175 postdoctoral
fellowships awarded between 1981 and 1995, 32% were to women.
John's leadership in the development of the Global Change
Instruction Modules was instrumental in getting the program
started. He has also made numerous efforts to reach the general
public through articles, books, and lectures, including many talks
at local high schools.
Lee Klinger (ACD), for effectively representing NCAR to the
public, teachers, schoolchildren, and the news media. Lee's work
as an ambassador for science helps both NCAR and the larger
community of atmospheric scientists to communicate our work to the
public and inspire young people to consider science as a career.
He has spent substantial personal time both developing materials
and presenting them in many different settings.
Peggy LeMone (MMM), for more than two decades of
"consistently, fervently, and unselfishly" moving science forward
"in numerous and generous educational endeavors." A prolific
writer, Peggy has contributed at all levels--graduate,
undergraduate, and K-12. She has been involved in the Education
and Tour program since its inception, has served in Project LEARN,
and has been active in the American Meteorological Society's
Project Atmosphere. She is an affiliate professor at Colorado
State University and has served on student committees at five
universities.
A beaming Peggy LeMone receives the performance award for
education. Also pictured are Bill Pennell, Bob Serafin, and Rick
Anthes.
Starley Thompson and Carter Emmart (CGD), for their efforts
over the past three years to communicate the results of global
climate system models to the general public and to enhance public
education on several levels. They have prepared two award-winning
videos that they and NCAR have used extensively as educational and
outreach tools. The two have also participated in education
presentations in support of UCAR and initiated a collaborative
relationship with the University of Colorado's Fiske Planetarium
that has resulted in an enhanced facility for teaching.
Joe VanAndel (ATD), for his work in establishing a computer
network at Centennial Middle School. The network allowed students
at Centennial to be the first in the world to publish a student
newspaper on the Internet. Joe also worked with University of
Colorado technical staff to set up the Web browsers Lynx and
Mosaic on the Boulder Valley School District-wide network. Joe is
now working with CU to develop technical standards that will allow
other schools to publish newspapers electronically.
Technical Support
This honor recognizes a team or individual for a single
superior performance or a history of noteworthy effort in such
areas as instrument maintenance or fabrication, computer or data
management, software/system development, or other technical
support.
Mitch Baltuch, Glenn Davis, Steve Emmerson, and Robb Kambic
(Unidata), for designing, developing, and successfully deploying
the nationwide Unidata Internet Data Distribution system. The
system, now used at 101 university sites, is "the only large-scale
system in existence that transfers significant volumes of data
(over 12 gigabytes per day . . .) with high reliability in near-
real time on the Internet." It was completed nearly a year ahead
of the original schedule.
Erik Miller (ATD), for management, postprocessing, and
documentation of the extensive data set obtained during the
Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere program's Coupled Ocean-
Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA/COARE). "Erik undertook this
work with a holistic approach, seeking and accepting
responsibilities for all factors affecting the final data quality
and utility." The data set is now being analyzed by researchers
around the world.
Administrative Support
This award honors an individual or group for a single
outstanding performance or a long history of support beyond the
call of duty in such areas as improving a management practice or
skillfully handling an operational effort.
Greg McArthur (SCD), for his leadership and contributions in
establishing a UCAR/NCAR presence on the World Wide Web and for
promoting the use of Web technologies in virtually every aspect of
UCAR/NCAR organizational support. Among Greg's activities in this
effort are designing and developing the first Web-based version of
the NCAR Annual Scientific Report, establishing NCAR's Web
home page (which has been accessed 1.6 million times this year),
and seeking new and better ways to bring this emergent technology
to every staff member.
Lena Miller (Facilities Support Services), for implementing
Central Stores. The stores offer an efficient and cost-effective
way to get supplies and parts as soon as they are needed so that
staff can be more productive on their own projects. "She has been
instrumental in creating a model of excellence that provides the
customers what they want, when they want it, for a fair and
reasonable price. . . . Her dedication to finding the most
environmentally sensitive product for a given application
continually enhances our commitment to the environment."
For a full listing of Performance Award Winners, see
Performance Award Winners through 1995
UCAR |
NCAR |
UOP
Edited by Bob Henson,
bhenson@ucar.edu
Last revised: Thu Mar 30 11:28:38 MST 2000