May 1999

Random Profile: Rita Roberts Every other month, Random Profile spotlights a stochastically chosen staff member. This time we feature Rita Roberts, an associate scientist with the Research Applications Program (RAP).

The Trojans of the fifth-grade girls' volleyball team at Sacred Heart of Jesus School in Boulder line up, left to right: Genny Cindrich, Erin Manka, Bridget Roberts, coach Rita Roberts, Lacey Montoya, Keelin Kelly, and Jackie Ariniello. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

Sitting by the dock of the bay. Growing up by the ocean in San Francisco, Rita liked to watch the cold fronts sweeping through. "On really windy days it was always of interest to me to try to understand where that wind came from and what was going on. But I didn't pursue it at first. I went to the University of San Francisco as a pre-med major and decided that really wasn't for me. So I switched to San Jose State University and got a B.S. in meteorology in 1982."

At San Jose State, Rita took advantage of NOAA's Cooperative Student Program. "I took two semesters off at different times and came out here to Boulder. I worked for NOAA at the Wave Propagation Laboratory, in the radar group. My supervisors were Bill Moninger and Bob Kropfli. As I was graduating they were hiring for JAWS at NCAR, and that's when I got hired on." The Joint Airport Weather Studies project, which focused on microbursts and wind shear, was housed in ATD in 1982. Rita moved over to RAP when it became a separate program in 1985. Then came tornado research, and "for most of the last ten years it's been thunderstorm nowcasting activity."

Ten years. Rita completed an M.S. in meteorology at Colorado State University in 1998. When she began in 1988 she was already the mother of two. "I finished the course work and then there were several years before I got the thesis done because I had two more kids in the middle of that. It was really busy."

"I would often get the kids to bed at night, go to bed myself, and then get up really early, like three o'clock in the morning, to do school work." Being really organized got her through, along with "a husband that helps quite a bit and shares in taking care of the kids. I couldn't have done it without him." Woody Roberts is a meteorologist at NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder. Do they talk shop at home? "Not very often."

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES). Rita works in a group that is developing an Auto-nowcaster system of software and hardware for thunderstorm detection. The system examines radar data and adds automated scientific reasoning (algorithms) to predict the life cycle of a thunderstorm over 30 to 60 minutes. Rita has been working on ideas for how best to incorporate GOES data into the system. Based on Rita's research, RAP software engineer Laurie Carson coded a cloud-growth algorithm that works with the satellite data.

Before and after: These two images show the work of the Auto-nowcaster, developed by a RAP team that includes Rita Roberts. At left is a radar reflectivity image from the NWS Doppler radar near Sterling, Virginia, taken during the Auto-nowcaster tests last summer on 13 June. The bright colors show a band of thunderstorms moving from left to right; the kidney-shaped outline just to the east shows where the Auto-nowcaster predicts the storms will move after 60 minutes. The image on the right shows the actual reflectivity after one hour has passed. The storms are now largely inside the Auto-nowcaster's predicted boundary. (Images courtesy Rita Roberts and RAP.)

Jim Wilson (ATD/RAP) has been Rita's supervisor throughout her NCAR career. "Working for Jim has been good for me. He's been a good mentor. He provides me with lots of opportunities to grow in my career. And he's a fun person to work for." Rita's other nowcasting colleagues have included Andrew Crook, Dan Megenhardt, Cindy Mueller, Tom Saxen, Jenny Sun, former RAP member Sandra Henry, and the RAP software engineering team.

The Auto-nowcaster has been through real-world testing for the past two summers at the NWS forecast office in Sterling, Virginia, and at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. (Cindy will be setting up an additional test at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, this summer.) So far, the cloud-growth algorithm has been particularly useful at the White Sands site, where it can provide 15 to 30 minutes of extra lead time beyond other nowcasting tools. At Sterling some adjustments are needed, mainly because the weather around the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area is less driven by local systems. With larger-scale systems doing the driving, clouds tend to move quickly through the area. "That's something we weren't expecting," says Rita. She'll travel to Sterling in May for some fine tuning. In September it's on to Australia where, with some support from the U.S. Weather Research Program, RAP's Auto-nowcaster will be one of five systems deployed in the Sydney 2000 project (see Staff Notes Monthly, March 1999.) "I'll be going down there for about a month with Terri Betancourt, our software engineer, and Jim. It's going to be a pretty busy setup; I don't know if I'll have much time for sightseeing. Of course, to go that far, you kind of have to try and do something. Next year, if we can somehow coordinate all of our activities, I'd like to try and get my whole family down there [before intensive operations begin]."

"I coach my daughter Bridget's volleyball team right now. And I've played almost every year on a semicompetitive women's team in the city leagues. . . . My kids keep me pretty busy." They're all girls: Jenean (15), Bridget (11 1/2), Kristen (5 1/2), and Courtney (3 1/2).

Several, and she's talked them over with the other women in RAP since they started a book group last January. "Right now we're reading Charming Billy by Alice McDermott." The group switched from potlucks in people's homes to lunchtime meetings at work to accommodate everyone's schedule. "I know all these women, but I would say I've gotten to know them better. That's been a nice feature of this book club that I hadn't anticipated."

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a fictional account of the building of one of Europe's cathedrals during the Middle Ages. "I've always been fascinated with the medieval era."

"You can see that forecasters get excited with some of the applications we bring to them because it really can make their lives a lot easier. . . . It's a nice thing to know your work is benefiting the community." • Zhenya Gallon

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