Tiffany Meyer joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on May 18th, 2020. Before joining Unidata, Tiffany had been at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) — a collaborative research facility sponsored by the University of Oklahoma — for the past 8 years. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and a Master of Science degree in Atmospheric Science with a focus on lightning from Colorado State University.
During her first three years at CIMMS, Tiffany worked with the NWS Warning Decision Training Division as the AWIPS-2 Focal Point creating training for the National Weather Service. The last five years she's been working with NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory as the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Program Coordinator and Technical Lead. Tiffany integrated new experimental products into AWIPS while NWS forecasters from around the country came to the HWT to test and provide feedback. She programmed a new Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) product, “Probability of Cloud-to-Ground Lightning” to help NWS and Emergency Managers with decision support.
Tiffany is joining Unidata's AWIPS team as Lead Developer, working with developer Shay Carter. She hopes to be able to use her considerable experience with AWIPS to aid non-operational users. For the university community, she wants to “stay on top of looking at the latest and newest data products that are coming out, and being able to modify [AWIPS] specifically for what the users need, since we're not focusing on forecasters.” Being able to add new types of visualizations to the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE) and ensuring continued access to AWIPS data via the cloud are high on her list of priorities.
Given that Tiffany has been involved with AWIPS development for a while, what brings her to Unidata? “I'm looking to be able to make a difference. I've been working with the Weather Service, and now I have the chance to work with a new community,” she says. In contrast with the Weather Service's very rigorous requirements, “we get to be creative in how we change and use AWIPS. We can look at data in different ways, and we can look at visualization in different ways.”
Tiffany will be Unidata's first “mainly remote” staff member; she'll be working from her home in Norman, OK the majority of the time at the beginning of her tenure. (While the COVID-19 pandemic has required all UCAR employees to work from home, Tiffany's remote-work arrangement was set up before the crisis.) While she may well end up in Boulder in the future, the current plan is to stay in Oklahoma and make periodic trips to the Unidata Program Center when that becomes possible again.
Away from the keyboard, Tiffany is a fast-pitch softball player and big fan of OU and Minnesota Vikings football. Along with her partner and their two dachshunds, she keeps her eye on her extensive vegetable and flower gardens, including a patch of Milkweed that provides habitat for Monarch butterflies. “We were even able to track them last year as they went south back to Mexico for the winter,” she says. She's also a hiker, and made it to the top of her first “fourteener” in Colorado last summer.
Please help us welcome Tiffany to the Unidata Program Center Team!
