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When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs (2010)

Chapter: Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
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G
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

Walter F. Dabberdt (Chair), Walter F. Dabberdt received a B.S. degree (marine transportation and meteorology) from the State University of New York Maritime College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees (meteorology) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He went on to conduct meteorological and air quality research for 15 years at Stanford Research Institute as a senior research meteorologist, followed by 15 years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as scientist, facility manager, and associate director. For the past 10 years, he has been director of strategic research and chief science officer for the Vaisala Group. Dabberdt was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Research Council (NRC) and later a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. His professional interests and experience include terrestrial observing systems; boundary-layer and mesoscale meteorology, air quality, and urban-scale meteorology and dispersion. He has served on numerous national and international panels and committees, and currently serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC); board chair of the Environmental Prediction in Canadian Cities (EPiCC) research program; chair of the Industrial Advisory Board of the multiuniversity Collaborative and Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere Engineering Research Center; chair of the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory’s External Advisory Committee; member of the International Science Steering Committee for the World Meteorological Organization GAW Urban Research Meteorology and Environment Shanghai Air Quality Forecasting Program; and co-chair of the National Oceanic and Armospheric Administration (NOAA) Science Advisory Board Environmental Information Services Working Group. Dabberdt is a fellow and past president (2008) of the American Meteorological Society and is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. He was also recognized as a lifetime national associate of NRC.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
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Richard (Rit) E. Carbone is a senior scientist and science advisor for the Earth Observing Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He has authored more than 100 scholarly works. A pioneer in Doppler radar, he has published on physical processes in clouds and storms, topographically influenced circulations, predictability of warm-season rainfall, convection on tropical islands, and severe storms. Mr. Carbone led the U.S. Weather Research Program until 1999. He founded and chaired the World Meteorological Organization’s World Weather Research Programme (Geneva) from 1996 to 2001 and served as vice president for the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences of the International Union of Geodesy & Geophysics. He earned an S.M. (atmospheric physics, 1969) at the University of Chicago and was elected a fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1994. Among other honors, in 2001, Mr. Carbone received the Cleveland Abbe Award for Distinguished Service to Atmospheric Science by an Individual. He was cited for “building consensus in the weather research community on problems of major national and international importance, and for fostering the conduct of collaborative and coordinated weather research.” He is also the recipient of the NCAR Publication Prize in 2002 “Inferences of predictability associated with warm season precipitation episodes.”


Shuyi S. Chen is a professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) of the University of Miami. Professor Chen is a widely published author whose research interests include mesoscale and tropical meteorology, air–sea interactions, high-resolution coupled atmosphere–wave–ocean modeling of tropical cyclones, and numerical weather prediction. She served as an editor for Weather and Forecasting journal of the American Meteorological Society. Professor Chen leads a research group at RSMAS/UM that has developed a high-resolution, fully coupled atmosphere–wave–ocean, vortex-following, nested-grids model for hurricane research and prediction. These efforts contribute directly to the development of the next-generation hurricane forecasting models. Professor Chen is a lead scientist for the Coupled Boundary Layer Air-Sea Transfer (CBLAST)-Hurricane modeling team sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. She is also a lead principal investigator for the National Science Foundation–funded Hurricane Rainbands and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX) that used three Doppler radar aircraft to collect unprecedented in situ data in hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ophelia during the 2005 hurricane season. Currently she is a lead scientist for one of the largest international programs to study the tropical cyclones in the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×

West Pacific. Her research has received broad national and international recognition. She was invited by the National Academy of Engineering to be a keynote speaker at the Indo-U.S. Frontiers Symposium in 2006 and recently was a keynote speaker at the First U.S.-China Symposium on Meteorology in 2008. In 2006, Professor Chen was awarded the NASA Group Achievement Award. Professor Chen served on a panel of experts for the Congressional Briefing on the National Hurricane Initiative at the U.S. House and Senate in July 2007. She testified as a witness at the Joint Hearing on the State of Hurricane Research and the National Hurricane Research Initiative Act of 2007, before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, Committee on Science and Technology of United States House of Representatives on June 26, 2008. Dr. Chen received her Ph.D. in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University in 1990.


Gregory S. Forbes is a severe weather expert for The Weather Channel, Inc. Dr. Forbes deals with dangerous thunderstorm weather hazards such as tornadoes, damaging winds, hail, floods, and lightning. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where he studied tornadoes and severe thunderstorms under Prof. T. Theodore Fujita—world famous for his invention of the F-scale used to rate tornadoes and for his discovery of intense thunderstorm downdrafts called microbursts. Dr. Forbes served as field manager for Project NIMROD, the first measurement program to study damaging thunderstorm winds from downbursts and microbursts. He then joined the faculty in the Department of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University in 1978, where as assistant and then associate professor he taught courses in weather analysis and forecasting, natural disasters, and other topics until joining The Weather Channel, Inc., in June 1999. Dr. Forbes has had a variety of experiences outside the classroom, including surveying the damage paths left by about 300 tornadoes and windstorms, among them Hurricane Andrew and Typhoon Paka. He has done collaborative research and consulting with the National Weather Service in the United States and with the national weather services in South Africa, Spain, and the Netherlands. He spent three summers performing studies to improve lightning forecasting at the Kennedy Space Center. He has written numerous papers on tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, and other meteorological topics and has co-authored and co-edited two books: Natural and Technological Disasters and Images in Weather Forecasting, the latter of which deals with the use of satellite and radar imagery in weather forecasting. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, a member of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Academy of Sciences, on the International

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
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Editorial Board of the International Journal of Meteorology; on the Board of Directors of StruckByLightning.org.


Efi Foufoula-Georgiou is a University of Minnesota McKnight Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and the Joseph T. and Rose S. Ling Chair in Environmental Engineering. She is director of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center—National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics—and has served as director of St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. She received a diploma in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an M.S. and Ph.D. (1985) in environmental engineering from the University of Florida. Her area of research is hydrology and geomorphology, with special interest in scaling theories, multiscale dynamics, and space-time modeling of precipitation and landforms. She has served as associate editor of Water Resources Research, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Advances in Water Resources, Hydrologic and Earth System Sciences, and as editor of the Journal of Hydrometeorology. She has also served on many national and international advisory boards including the Water Science and Technology Board, NSF, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and European Union advisory panels, and in several NRC studies. She has also served as the chair of the Board of Directors for CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences), a member of the Board of Trustees of UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), and a member of the Advisory Council of the GEO directorate of NSF. Professor Foufoula has been the recipient of the John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Society and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Hydrologic Sciences Award. She is a fellow of the AGU and the American Meteorological Society, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences.


Rebecca E. Morss is a Scientist III at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, with appointments in the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division and the Integrated Science Program. She studies meteorological, socioeconomic, and public policy aspects of weather forecasts, floods, hurricanes, and related topics. Her recent research includes studies of the use of weather and climate information in decision making, meteorological and oceanographic observing network design, scale interactions in atmospheric predictability, and communication of uncertainty in weather forecasts. Through disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, she aims to integrate atmospheric science, socioeconomic, and policy perspec-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×

tives to provide information for the benefit of society. Dr. Morss led the initial development of the socioeconomic component of the international THORPEX program under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization. She is also a founding member of NCAR’s Collaborative Program on the Societal Impacts and Economic Benefits of Weather Information and the Weather and Society*Integrated Studies program. Among other activities, she currently serves on the NOAA Science Advisory Board Environmental Information Services Working Group, and in 2008 she was elected to the Council of the American Meteorological Society. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


John T. Snow is Regents’ Professor of Meteorology, dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, and administrator of the National Weather Center. Dr. Snow’s current professional interest is in earth system science, the integration of the best available knowledge from the earth and life sciences to provide a holistic picture of how the world works. His primary research area for many years has been in the dynamics of columnar vortices, ranging in scale from small dust devils to tornadoes. Dr. Snow’s second area of research is in meteorological and environmental measurements. He has published widely in these and related areas, and made numerous presentations at professional and scientific meetings. Dr. Snow is a fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the Royal Meteorological Society of the United Kingdom. He is a certified consulting meteorologist. He recently finished serving on the NOAA Science Advisory Board.


Xubin Zeng is a professor of atmospheric science (since 2004) and director of the Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center (since 2008) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Zeng’s research in the past 20 years, through over 100 peer-reviewed publications, has covered atmospheric turbulence (theory, parameterization, its interaction with clouds and radiation, and large-eddy simulations), mesoscale modeling of atmospheric flow over complex terrain, chaos theory and its applications to the atmosphere, global land–atmosphere interactions, ocean–atmosphere interactions, sea ice–atmosphere interactions, monsoon dynamics, remote sensing, and most recently, nonlinear dynamics of vegetation. In the past 10 years, he has focused on the land–atmosphere–ocean–sea-ice interface processes of the Earth’s climate system by integrating global modeling with remote sensing and in situ data. He has acted as a bridge linking the remote sensing and field experiment community to the weather and climate modeling com-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×

munity. He has given over 70 invited talks at conferences and institutions. His research products (including models, algorithms, and value-added datasets) have been used worldwide by numerous groups (including NCAR, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). He recently served on the NASA Earth Science Senior Review Panel and the NRC Committee on the NOAA Data Archive and Access. Currently he serves on the Council (governing body) of the American Meteorological Society, the National Academies Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC), and International CLIVAR Asian-Australian Monsoon Panel. He is also the editor of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences and co-chairs the Scientific Steering Committee, State Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zeng earned his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from Colorado State University in 1992.

NRC Staff

Curtis H. Marshall is currently the National Mesonet Program manager at the National Weather Service. Prior to his position at the NWS, Curtis was a senior program officer with BASC. He received B.S. (1995) and M.S. (1998) degrees in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and a Ph.D. (2004) in atmospheric science from Colorado State University. His doctoral research, which examined the impact of anthropogenic land-use change on the mesoscale climate of the Florida peninsula, was featured in Nature and The New York Times. Prior to joining the staff of BASC in 2006, he was employed as a research scientist at NOAA. As a BASC program officer, he directed peer reviews for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and staffed studies on mesoscale meteorological observing systems, weather radar, the NPOESS spacecraft, and the impacts of climate change on human health.


Toby Warden is an associate program officer with the National Academies and serves within BASC. She received a Ph.D. in social ecology, with an emphasis on environmental analysis and design, from the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral research focused on the U.S. Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement.


Maggie Walser is a program officer with BASC. Prior to joining the NRC, she was the AGU/AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow, working with the majority staff of the Senate Committee on Energy and

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×

Natural Resources. Maggie received B.S. degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering from the University of California, Irvine. She also completed her Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focused on the composition and photochemistry of secondary organic aerosol, as well as measurement of biogenic emissions of atmospherically relevant trace gases.


Lauren Brown is a research associate and former Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the Polar Research Board and BASC. She is completing her M.S. degree in marine studies with a concentration in physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware. Her research involves the analysis of tidal currents, velocity structure, and ocean physics off the coast of northwestern Greenland to determine their influence on the larger regional dynamics. She holds a B.A. from the University of Delaware in physics and astronomy. She is especially interested in high-latitude policy issues and the role of the polar regions in global climate change.


JaNeise Sturdivant is a program assistant for BASC. Since joining BASC in 2009, she has worked on studies and workshops involving greenhouse gas emissions, climate choices, and weather studies. Ms. Sturdivant is interested in communications.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
Page 179
Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
Page 180
Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
Page 181
Suggested Citation:"Appendix G: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12888.
×
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When Weather Matters: Science and Services to Meet Critical Societal Needs Get This Book
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The past 15 years have seen marked progress in observing, understanding, and predicting weather. At the same time, the United States has failed to match or surpass progress in operational numerical weather prediction achieved by other nations and failed to realize its prediction potential; as a result, the nation is not mitigating weather impacts to the extent possible.

This book represents a sense of the weather community as guided by the discussions of a Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate community workshop held in summer 2009. The book puts forth the committee's judgment on the most pressing high level, weather-focused research challenges and research to operations needs, and makes corresponding recommendations. The book addresses issues including observations, global non-hydrostatic coupled modeling, data assimilation, probabilistic forecasting, and quantitative precipitation and hydrologic forecasting. The book also identifies three important, emerging issues—predictions of very high impact weather, urban meteorology, and renewable energy development—not recognized or emphasized in previous studies. Cutting across all of these challenges is a set of socioeconomic issues, whose importance and emphasis—while increasing—has been undervalued and underemphasized in the past and warrants greater recognition and priority today.

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