ATD Director's Message
It is with a great sense of pride in the people who make ATD such an
effective and vibrant part of NCAR that we reflect in this report on the past year.
All the trends of previous years - increased numbers of projects to
support, new ideas and developments to pursue, wider interactions
across disciplines and institutions to foster - have continued
and perhaps even accelerated. We have not yet found our own limits,
an observation in and of itself testimony to the ATD staff's dedication
and commitment to our goals and mission. More and more I have come to recognize the similarity of the division to an organic, sensate entity. It changes, reacts, grows, and promulgates just as all living organisms do. More and more the formal organizational boundaries fade from our consciousness and we find all parts of the division essential to each other, and the demarcations we have created more and more artificial.
None of this should surprise us, given how appreciation of our science and our world as integrated systems has grown increasingly strong over the past decade. We talk, hear and read of economic, demographic and political globalization every day. When NCAR and UCAR were first created, the term "globalization" didn't exist, and yet the recognition of the early founders of the boarder-less nature of weather influences (in those days on allied military operations in WWII) was globalization aborning.
Throughout the more than four decades of NCAR's (and the facilities') existence, example after example of the Earth-wide nature of meteorology, atmospheric sciences, and now environmental sciences, exist. All the way from the Global Atmospheric Research Program in the 60s, to the International H2O Project in spring of 2002 progress has derived from integrating approaches, research questions, and results in a systemic way.
So it also should not surprise us that ATD reflects, and we hope helps sets standards for, the value of considering the "Big Picture". Without such a breadth of approach and understanding, the range of services and science accomplished in this division would not be feasible. And so, as in every year past, I welcome your attention to the pages of this report which document ATD's 2002AD, and, as always and with gratitude, I acknowledge and salute every individual in the division for their continued excellence and perseverance.