National Academies Press: OpenBook

Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services (2003)

Chapter: Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
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Appendix F
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members

John A. Armstrong, chair, is retired IBM vice president of science and technology. He is the author or co-author of some 60 papers on nuclear resonance, nonlinear optics, photon statistics of lasers, picosecond pulse measurements, multiphoton spectroscopy of atoms, management of research in industry, and issues of science and technology policy. He received the George E. Pake Prize of the American Physical Society in 1989. He has served on numerous National Research Council (NRC) bodies, including the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, where he was liaison to the Computer Science and Technology Board. He also chaired the recent NRC study Managing the Space Sciences. Dr. Armstrong is currently chair of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a member of the National Science Board, Class of 2002.

Richard A. Anthes,vice-chair, is president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). His research interests include weather phenomena such as hurricanes and tropical cyclones. Following a faculty position at Pennsylvania State University, he joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), first as director of the Atmospheric Analysis and Prediction Division, then as director of NCAR. He become president of UCAR in 1988. Dr. Anthes has published over 100 articles and books. One book in particular, Meteorology (7th ed., Prentice Hall, 1996), is widely used at colleges and universities as a general introductory book to the field of meteorology for non-meteorology majors. Dr. Anthes chaired

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
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the NRC’s Committee on National Weather Service Modernization and was a member on the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Committee on Earth Studies.

William Y. Arms is a professor of computer science at Cornell University. Although his background is in mathematics and operational research, his career has focused on applying computing to academic activities, particularly educational computing, computer networks, and digital libraries. He recently chaired a National Science Foundation workshop on a national digital library for undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education and authored a section in an NRC report on the same subject. Dr. Arms is a former chair of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves as editor of D-Lib Magazine and a digital libraries and electronic publishing series by MIT Press.

William E. Easterling III is professor of geography and Earth system science and director of the Environmental Consortium and Environmental Resources Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. His current research focuses on modeling El Niño-Southern Oscillation effects on southeastern agriculture, social drivers of land use change in response to climate change in the Great Plains, and the use of high-resolution climate change scenarios to simulate crop yields. Dr. Easterling chaired the NRC Panel on the Human Dimensions of Seasonal-to-Interannual Climate Variability that produced the report Making Climate Forecasts Matter. He is the lead author of the chapter on agroecosystems and food security in the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has edited three books related to the impact of climate change on society.

Richard S. Greenfield was the first director of the Atmospheric Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Before joining the staff of the AMS, he spent 25 years at the National Science Foundation, including nearly seven as director of the Division of Atmospheric Sciences. Dr. Greenfield’s primary policy interests include weather and climate influences on national priorities, national and international approaches to data exchange issues, and public-private partnerships to provide weather and climate products and services. Internationally, he served as a U.S. delegate to the World Meteorological Organization and as a member of several of its commissions, panels, and boards. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards.

William W. Hoover (ret.) is currently a consultant for aviation, defense, and energy matters. He is the former executive vice president of the Air Transport Association of America, where he represented the interests of the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×

U.S. major airlines industry, particularly as they related to technical, safety, and security issues. Prior to holding that position, he served as the assistant secretary for defense programs at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he was responsible for the U.S. nuclear weapons development program. He is also a major general, U.S. Air Force (retired), and held positions of responsibility within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, at the Pentagon with the secretary of the Air Force, and in Vietnam, where he commanded a combat air wing and flew as a fighter pilot. General Hoover currently chairs the NRC’s Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board.

Jessica Litman is a professor of law at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where she teaches courses in copyright law, Internet law, trade-marks, and unfair competition. Before joining the Wayne State faculty in 1990, she was an associate professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Ms. Litman is the author of the recently published book Digital Copyright (Prometheus, 2001). She has also published many articles on copyright, trademark, and Internet law and is co-author of the third edition of Ginsburg, Litman & Kevlin, Trademark and Unfair Competition Law (Foundation, 2001). Ms. Litman is a past trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA and a past chair of the American Association of Law Schools’ Section on Intellectual Property. She has testified before Congress and before the White House Information Infrastructure Task Force’s Working Group on Intellectual Property. She currently serves on the advisory board of Cyberspace Law Abstracts and the American Civil Liberties Union Committee on Intellectual Property and the Internet.

Gordon McBean is a professor in the departments of geography and political science at the University of Western Ontario and chair for policy at the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, which is supported by the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Prior to June 2000 he was the assistant deputy minister for the Meteorological Service of Canada, Environment Canada, and permanent representative of Canada to the World Meteorological Organization. In that position he directed a two-year analysis of weather services that redefined the role of the government. He is currently a member of the Task Force for the Canadian Information System for the Environment and the International Council for Science Advisory Committee for the Environment. He has served on several NRC committees, including the Panel on Climate Observing Systems Strategy. Dr. McBean has also served as a consultant to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and co-chaired the Subpanel on Earth Observations of a review of Japan’s National Space Development Agency.

Ravi V. Nathan is general manager of the Weather Derivatives Group at

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×

Aquila, Inc., where he is responsible for strategic initiatives and day-to-day management of the weather derivatives business. An economist and financial analyst by training, Dr. Nathan has spent the past five years developing strategies for allowing businesses sensitive to the vagaries of weather to protect themselves against changes in costs and sales linked to variations in climate. Prior to working in the weather derivatives industry, he spent five years as an associate professor of finance at Northeastern Oklahoma State University and five years as a manager at Grindlays ANZ Bank in Bombay, India. Dr. Nathan is president of the Weather Risk Management Association and was a participant in the U.S. Weather Research Program Workshop on the weather research needs of the private sector.

Maria A. Pirone is director for global data products and services at WSI Corporation. She has over 25 years’ experience in information technology, with the last 15 years in weather information services. She has degrees in chemistry and business administration and has held management positions in both marketing and technical development. She is currently responsible for the policy, direction, and revenue performance for WSI’s global data and imagery products and services. Market responsibility includes media, aviation, government, industry, and education. She serves as liaison to both U.S. and international meteorological agencies for WSI and was appointed private sector advisor to the U.S. permanent representative to WMO for the 2000 Executive Council meeting in Geneva. Ms. Pirone is a member of the American Meteorological Society’s Private Sector Board, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Weather Research Program Product Development Team, and RTCA’s Special Committee 195 for Datalink Applications for Aviation, and is president of the Commercial Weather Services Association.

Roy Radner is the Leonard N. Stern School Professor of Business at New York University. Prior to joining New York University, he was a distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and a professor of economics and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Radner’s research interests include the strategic analysis of global climate change, and theories of information processing and decentralization within firms. He is a member of the NRC Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data, and a past member of the NRC High-Technology/Information-Technology Workforce. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a distinguished fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Economic Association.

Robert T. Ryan is chief meteorologist with WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. He began his broadcast career in 1970 while working as a research associ-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×

ate in the physics section of Arthur D. Little, Inc., in Cambridge, Mass. He has since won eight Emmys for excellence in broadcast meteorology. In addition to his broadcast activities, Mr. Ryan developed the 4-WINDS program (Weather Interactive Demonstration Schoolnet), which placed 200 interactive computerized weather stations in “at need” Washington areas schools. He has written several articles on the need to better communicate scientific information and is co-investigator of a NASA-funded cooperative agreement with WRC-TV to provide public access to Earth and space science data via television. Mr. Ryan is a fellow and former president of the American Meteorological Society, and is currently chair of the AMS Development Committee. He received the Charles Franklin Brooks Award for service to that society in 1997. He is a past member of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.

Karen R. Sollins is a principal research scientist in the Advanced Network Architecture Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). Her research interests focus on support for network based systems and applications. Several years ago she led the Information Mesh Project, addressing architectural problems of an extremely long-lived global mesh of information, followed by work on issues of extreme scaling in the net. She was a guest editor of a special issue of Personal Communication on Smart Environments in October 2000. In addition to publishing, she has taken her work to the standards community and chaired a research group consisting of a mix of academics and members of industry to address infrastructural problems. In 1999 and 2000 she was a senior program director for networking research at the National Science Foundation, on leave from LCS.

NRC Staff

Anne M. Linn is a senior program officer with the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies. She has been with the board since 1993, directing the USA World Data Center Coordination Office, and staffing a wide variety of geophysical and data policy studies. In addition, she is the secretary of the International Council for Science (ICSU) Panel on World Data Centers, and a member of the ICSU Ad Hoc Committee on Data. Prior to joining the staff of the National Academies, Dr. Linn was a visiting scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a postdoctoral geochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Ph.D. in geology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Cynthia Patterson is a study director and program officer with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Acad-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×

emies. She is currently involved in several CSTB projects, including one on critical information infrastructure protection and the law, a project that explores the intersection of geospatial information and computer science research communities, and a congressionally-mandated study on Internet searching and the domain name system. Prior to joining CSTB, Ms. Patterson completed an M.Sc from the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her graduate work was supported by the Department of Defense and SAIC. In a previous life, Ms. Patterson was employed by IBM as an IT consultant for both federal government and private industry clients. Her work included application development, database administration, network administration, and project management. She received a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Missouri, Rolla.

Shannon Ruddy is a senior project assistant with the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources at the National Research Council. She holds a B.A. in environmental science from LaSalle University in Philadelphia. Previously, she worked as a researcher for Booz-Allen & Hamilton in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3 CERCLA/Superfund records center.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2003. Fair Weather: Effective Partnership in Weather and Climate Services. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10610.
×
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Decades of evolving U.S. policy have led to three sectors providing weather services—NOAA (primarily the National Weather Service [NWS]), academic institutions, and private companies. This three-sector system has produced a scope and diversity of weather services in the United States second to none. However, rapid scientific and technological change is changing the capabilities of the sectors and creating occasional friction. Fair Weather: Effective Partnerships in Weather and Climate Services examines the roles of the three sectors in providing weather and climate services, the barriers to interaction among the sectors, and the impact of scientific and technological advances on the weather enterprise. Readers from all three sectors will be interested in the analysis and recommendations provided in Fair Weather.

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