The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome six new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; terms are finishing up for three members of the Users committee and three members of the Policy committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in mid-September, 2012.
The UPC staff looks forward to working with our new committee members, and to having all the current members of both committees at the Program Center in Boulder, Colorado for the September meeting.
The following provides a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees. You can find additional information about the governing committees, including contact information for committee members, on the Governing Committees page.
Lynn McMurdie, Policy Committee
Dr. Lynn McMurdie is a Senior Lecturer and Research Meteorologist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. She teaches several courses in Synoptic Meteorology, Weather Analysis and Forecasting, and Dynamics, and received the Department Teaching Award in 1999, 2004 and 2011. Her current research interests include predictability of synoptic scale weather systems over oceanic and coastal regions, winter-time lightning in cold air outbreaks, orographic precipitation and remote sensing of water vapor and liquid and frozen precipitation.
"I am excited to serve on the Unidata Policy Committee, after many years as a user of Unidata software and data in my teaching and research," says Dr. McMurdie.
Michael Baldwin, Users Committee
Dr. Michael Baldwin is an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University, where he teaches weather analysis and forecasting. His research interests include numerical weather prediction, forecast verification, data assimilation, and data mining.
Baldwin is an Editor for the American Meteorological Society journal Weather and Forecasting, and was co-organizer of the 2010 NCAR Advanced Study Program's summer colloquium on forecast verification. He presented a session titled "The Betts-Miller-Janjic Convective Parameterization" at the 2006 Unidata Users Workshop.
Michael Piasecki, Policy Committee
Dr. Michael Piasecki holds degrees in civil engineering from the University of Hanover, Germany (Diplom, 1991), and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1994) with a focus on water resources engineering. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at City College of New York in New York City.
Piasecki's research interests center on the area of hydroinformatics, focusing on the development of solutions for semantic heterogeneities in the hydrologic community data world. In this capacity he focuses on the creation and representation of hydrologic processes and controlled vocabularies using ontologies and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems. He is also interested in developing theme-based data search approaches across heterogeneous data store platforms.
Piasecki is a member of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information Systems team, which is developing a prototype information system of the hydrologic community. He is also chairperson (elect) of the Earth and Space Science Informatics Focus group at AGU and serves as co Editor-in-Chief for Computers & GeoSciences and Earth Perspectives and as Associate editor for Earth System Informatics and HydroInformatics.
Robert Fovell, Policy Committee
Dr. Robert Fovell is a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA, where he teaches courses in numerical modeling, advanced dynamic and synoptic meteorology, Earth systems, and general meteorology. His research focuses on mesoscale meteorology, primarily using high-resolution numerical models. He is an internationally recognized modeler whose learning materials include visualizations of gravity waves, downslope winds, thunderstorms, and other phenomena.
Fovell is a recipient of the American Meteorological Society Teaching Excellence Award (2012) and the UCLA distinguished teaching award (2005). He presented a session titled "Using Numerical Models to Illustrate Basic and Advanced Physical and Thermodynamical Concepts" and demonstrated his Dynamics and Thermodynamics Demonstration Model (DTDM) at the 2006 Unidata Users Workshop. Fovell also created a course entitled "Meteorology: An Introduction to the Wonders of the Weather" for the recorded lecture series The Great Courses.
Russ Schumacher, Users Committee
Dr. Russ Schumacher is assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, where he has been since 2011. Prior to that, he held the same position at Texas A&M University. At both universities, he has been a regular user of Unidata software and data in research and teaching, including GEMPAK, LDM, and IDV. His research interests are primarily in mesoscale meteorology, including mesoscale convective systems, heavy precipitation, and numerical prediction, and he teaches courses in synoptic and mesoscale meteorology. As a member of the Users committee, he hopes to learn more about the new products and services that Unidata provides, as well as to help guide the future advances to make them even more useful in research and education.
Dr. Schumacher shared an interesting aspect of his numerical weather prediction work in a well-received talk titled "Integrating real-time datasets and existing resources toward the development of a small, cheap ensemble prediction system for use in research and education" at the 2012 Unidata Users Workshop. (His presentation is available on the workshop RAMADDA site.)
Sam Ng, Users Committee
Dr. Sam Ng is an associate professor of Synoptic and Mesoscale Meteorology at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where he has taught courses in synoptic meteorology, weather analysis, forecasting, and mesoscale meteorology since 2006. He also serves as the faculty advisor for the Metropolitan State student chapter of the American Meteorological Society.
Ng's research interests include mesoscale convective systems, winter weather phenomenon, rapid cyclogenesis, occlusion processes, quantitative precipitation forecasting, and numerical weather prediction. He currently chairs the National Weather Association's Weather Analysis and Forecasting committee.
