Who We Are Forty Years of Discovery and Partnerships: timeline

UCAR at 40 •Who We Are Introduction One Planet, One Atmosphere Between Sun and Earth Measuring and Modeling When Weather Matters Most Spreading the Word Knowledge for All Looking toward the Future UCAR at a Glance List of acronyms

1960s

1960 • First Breath UCAR is formally incorporated on June 1. Boulder is chosen as the site of UCAR headquarters and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Walter Orr Roberts becomes UCAR president and NCAR director, and the High Altitude Observatory he founded joins the new center.

1963 • Up and Away At Palestine, Texas, NCAR opens its National Scientific Balloon Facility, which remains part of UCAR into the 1980s. In 1965, NCAR acquires its first supercomputer, a Control Data Corporation 6600, and its first aircraft, a Beech Queen Air 80. Each of these resources is made available, through a community review process, to university and NCAR scientists.

1967 • Mesa Lab NCAR's Mesa Laboratory, designed by I.M. Pei, is dedicated on May 10. The striking architecture of the Mesa Lab soon makes it an internationally recognized landmark.

1970 • Extended Family The University of Toronto becomes the first non–U.S. member of UCAR. Several other Canadian universities follow. In 1986 and 1990, UCAR begins adding international affiliates (doctorate-granting programs) and academic affiliates (bachelor's- and master's-level programs within the United States). By century's end, the UCAR family has grown from the original 14 members to include over 80 members and affiliates. (Photo © University of Toronto)

1974 • Launching GARP NCAR's first large field programs are intimately tied to the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP). UCAR spends years coordinating universities and research laboratories around the world to prepare for 1974's GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE). The study documents the tropical Atlantic in unprecedented detail, producing a data set still in use over 25 years later.

1977 • Faster Still A new computing room at the Mesa Lab hosts the CRAY-1A. This computer, the first production-level machine from Cray Research, brings NCAR support for university computing to a new level. The new CRAY also accommodates the growing demands of NCAR climate and weather models.

1983 • UCAR Expands The University Data Program (Unidata) is launched to provide campuses with software and support for acquiring up-to-the-minute weather data. Unidata is one of the first UCAR initiatives formed outside of NCAR. Almost a dozen more programs follow, many of them grouped in 1992 as the UCAR Office of Programs (UOP).

1987 • Climate Crises Bolstered by the research of NCAR and collaborators, the worldwide Montreal Protocol addresses the threat of stratospheric ozone depletion with restrictions on the chlorofluorocarbons that catalyze ozone loss. The next summer, the nation endures drought, wildfire, and a brutal heat wave as the threat of global warming leaps into public and political prominence. With their work at the center of these issues, NCAR scientists testify before Congress on climate change and help explain the complexities of the science to the public. (Photo by Gary Herbert, NOAA)

1990 • Foothills Lab UCAR purchases a building in northeast Boulder for its growing staff. Together with nearby buildings, the Foothills Laboratory soon holds roughly 500 employees, rivaling the Mesa Laboratory in staff and square footage.

1995 • GPS Breakthrough A miniature satellite, MicroLab-1, retrieves signals from the Global Positioning System and produces the first soundings of Earth's atmosphere using the radio occultation technique. By analyzing the GPS signals, UCAR-based scientists infer the state of the atmosphere along the signals' path. The successful prototype points toward a new way to monitor weather and climate. At the end of the decade, a network of GPS receivers on the ground and in space is planned by UOP and collaborators to provide high-resolution data on weather and climate variables around the globe and around the clock.

1997–98 • El Niño A huge El Niño event draws global attention. One of the strongest warmings of the eastern tropical Pacific on record, it brings flooding to the southern United States and other effects worldwide. Building on their work since the 1970s, physical and social scientists at NCAR analyze El Niño and its impacts in depth. A year later, NCAR hosts the world's first summit on La Niña. (Illustration courtesy NASA)