Staff Accomplishments

Dr. Patrick Veres, scientist at the NSF NCAR Research Aviation Facility, is a member of a collaborative research team receiving NOAA's 2025 Outstanding Scientific Paper of the Year award. The multi-institutional team was recognized for their exceptional 2023 paper "Midlatitude Ozone Depletion and Air Quality Impacts from Industrial Halogen Emissions in the Great Salt Lake Basin". This collaborative effort brought together scientists from NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory, CIRES, and multiple universities to conduct groundbreaking research on halogen emissions and their effects on ozone and air quality. 

Midlatitude Ozone Depletion and Air Quality Impacts from Industrial Halogen Emissions in the Great Salt Lake Basin

Dr. Holger Vömel (EOL Senior Scientist), Stephanie Evan (CNRS/Météo-France) and Matt Tully (Bureau of Meteorology, Australia), for 2022:  “Water Vapor Injection into the stratosphere by Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai.”, Science, 377, 1444-1447, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abq2299

Gregg Fahrenbruch, NSF NCAR Aviation Operations Manager, for rebuilding the Research Aviation Facility into a compliant, mission-ready aviation program. 

Dr. Jothiram “Vivek” Vivekanandan, EOL Senior Scientist, has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Meteorological Society (IMS), one of the highest distinctions in Indian atmospheric science. This honor recognizes his exceptional contributions to meteorology and related sciences, and their significant impact in India and beyond.

Dr. Steven Oncley, EOL Scientist, for over three decades of outstanding scientific research and community service in EOL's In-Situ Sensing Facility.

Dr. Tammy Weckwerth, EOLSenior Scientist  for her meaningful style of mentoring, which has had significant positive impacts on innumerable careers across the organization and beyond.

Dr. Jorgen B. Jensen, EOL Scientist, for his scientific achievements, mentoring, and leadership spanning nearly two decades in the Research Aviation Facility (RAF).

Chrissy Fladung (EOL), Reva Golden (HESS). Scotty McClain (EOL), Pavel Romashkin (EOL), Anna Vasilyeva (HESS), Cory Wolff (EOL) for their extraordinary effort and commitment to bring the EOL field campaigns back into operation after they were suspended due to the COVID-19 shutdown.

David Allen (CPAESS), Chris Burghart, Michael Dixon, Maureen Donovan, Scott Ellis, Jonathan Emmett, Wen-Chau Lee, Eric Loew, Mark Lord, Charlie Martin, James Ranson, Steve Rauenbuehler, Pei-Sang Tsai, Jothiram Vivekanandan, and Kurt Zrubek from EOL for the design, development, and construction of the NCAR HIAPER Cloud Radar (HCR), a pod-based, W-band, scanning dual-polarization, Doppler airborne radar that is mounted under the wing of the NSF/NCAR GV aircraft. Although successfully completed in 2015, it's application to field campaigns in the years since has proven the product exceptional.

Dr. Jeffrey Stith, EOL Senior Scientist and RAF Facility Manager, for his 20-year leadership of the NCAR Aviation Program. 

Alan Bol (COMET), Teresa Campos (ACOM), William “Al” Cooper (EOL), Steve Deyo (COMET), Julie Haggerty (EOL), Tony Mancus (COMET), Gary Pacheco (COMET), Alison Rockwell (EOL), David Russi (COMET), Amy Stevermer (COMET), Holger Vömel (EOL), and Cory Wolff (EOL) for their outstanding contribution to Education and Outreach found in their Atmospheric Instrumentation and Measurement Training entitled, "Synergistic Environments in Graduate and Undergraduate Education (SEGUE)." SEGUE is a comprehensive, online, interactive, multimedia course that consists of ten high-quality, instructional lessons covering the broad subject area of meteorological instrumentation, measurements, and observing systems. The reach of the program was broadened by translating to languages other than English.

Scott Spuler, Matt Hayman, Tammy Weckwerth, Bruce Morley (formerly NCAR), Jim Ranson, Todd Bernatsky, Rich Erickson, Kevin Repasky (Montana State University), and Amin Nehrir (NASA) for the Micro-Pulse DIAL (MPD) instrument,  a new-generation observing system that can measure vertical variations in water vapor from the boundary layer to the mid-free-troposphere.

Dr. Michael Dixon for his valiant efforts to improve community radar and lidar analysis software, envisioning a new software paradigm, and reinvigorating NCAR's role as a leader in radar software as co-principal investigator of the Lidar Radar Open Software Environment (LROSE) project.

25th Award for An Outstanding Research Paper on Instruments and Methods of Observation

R.J. Dirksen, M. Sommer, F.J. Immler, D.F. Hurst, R. Kivi and H. Vömel, Reference quality upper-air measurements: GRUAN data processing for the Vaisala RS92 radiosonde​, Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, 7, pp 4463-4490, 2014

Yanping Li and Richard E. Carbone (EOL) for 2012: Excitation of Rainfall Over the Tropical Western Pacific. Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 69, 2983-2994, doi: 10.1175/JAS-D-11-0245.1

Roy Rasmussen (RAL), C. Liu (RAL), K. Ikeda (RAL), D. Gochis (RAL), D. Yates (RAL), F. Chen (RAL), M. Tewari (IBM Watson Research Center), M. Barlage (RAL), J. Dudhia (MMM), W. Yu (RAL), K. Miller (RAL), K. Arsenault (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Vanda Grubišić (EOL), G. Thompson (RAL), and E. Gutmann (RAL), 2011: "High-resolution coupled climate runoff simulations of seasonal snowfall over Colorado: A process study of current and warmer climate." Journal of Climate, 24 (11), 3015-3048.

Charlie Martin for his unique vision which led to the development and integration of Field Programmable Gate Array technology into several NSF remote sensing platforms, including the HIAPER Cloud, S-Polka, and Doppler on Wheels radars as well as the 449 Megahertz Wind Profiler. 

Greg Card, Rebecca Centeno-Elliott, Michael Knölker, Alice Lecinski, Ron Lull, Chris Mahan, Jim Ranson, Rich Summers, Tom Wissman, Piyush Agrawal (CU), Justus Brosche (CU), Clemens Halbgewachs (University of Freiburg), Bruce Hardy (consultant), and Courtney Peck (CU) for designing, building, rebuilding, and flying the Sunrise gondola and pointing system, which enabled groundbreaking observations of the Sun at spatio-temporal resolutions never before achieved.

Alison Rockwell for developing EOL’s Program for Education and Public Engagement to help principal investigators implement targeted education and outreach activities as part of their field campaigns.

Britt Stephens, Pavel Romashkin, Henry Boynton, Ed Ringleman, John Cowan, Greg Bruning, Brent Kidd, Alison Rockwell, and Janine Aquino (all EOL) for their contributions to the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations project.

Dr. William "Al" Cooper for his lead role in coordinating the creation and integration of 14 externally developed instruments installed on the NSF/NCAR HIAPER Gulfstream V jet.

Briesa St. Martin, Jim Moore, Jorgen Jensen, Kathleen Barney, Maureen Donovan, Santiago Newbery, Scott Briggs, Steven Oncley, Wen-Chau Lee with Steven Rutledge (Colorado State University), Patrick Kennedy (Colorado State University), Robert Cifelli (formerly Colorado State University), Al Rodi (University of Wyoming), and Jeff French (University of Wyoming) for organizing the 2009 Advanced Study Program Colloquium, "Exploring the Atmosphere:  Observational Instruments and Techniques".

Dr. Jim Wilson and Dr. Rita Roberts for teaching students, scientists, and weather forecasters how to make better forecasts of convective weather with Autonowcaster, a forecast decision system that incorporates much of their research and is now operational in selected U.S. National Weather Service, Army, and international forecast offices.

Terry Hock and Dean Lauritsen for their leadership and central role in developing innovative new dropsonde technology as well as transformative delivery systems.

Jack Fox, DFS Facility Manager, for transforming the EOL Design and Fabrication Services into a world-class premier facility to design and build equipment for atmospheric and related research.

Greg Meymaris, John Hubbert, Mike Dixon, Scott Ellis for developing the Clutter Mitigation Decision (CMD) algorithm.

Britt Stephens with K. Gurney, Pieter P. Tans, Colm Sweeney, Wouter Peters, Lori Bruhwiler, Philippe Ciais, Michel Ramonet, Philippe Bousquet, Takakiyo Nakazawa, Shuji Aoki, Toshinobu Machida, Gen Inoue, Nikolay Vinnichenko, Jon Lloyd, Armin Jordan, Martin Heimann, Olga Shibistova, Ray L. Langenfelds, L. Paul Steele, Roger J. Francey, and A. Scott Denning, for 2007:: “Weak Northern and Strong Tropical Land Carbon Uptake from Vertical Profiles of Atmospheric CO₂." Science, 316, 1732-1735.

Gary New, Julie Harris (CISL), Steven Haynes, Dave Patterson, Dave Maddy, Brian McMillan, John Adamson, Matt Monahan, Dave Heckel, Gordon Kinn, John Harkness, Sandra Sundquist, Leonard Cooper, Bruce Kovalski, Keith White, Peter Chamberlain and Bart Woodiel for designing, implementing, and commissioning significant new ML infrastructure as part of the Bluefire Facilities Infrastructure Team.

Dennis Ward, Dolores Kiessling, Janine Goldstein (Aquino), Jeff Weber, Linda Carbone, Tim Barnes, William Bradley for hosting Super Science Saturday in support of UCAR's mission to educate the public about the atmospheric and related sciences.

William "Al" Cooper for his mentoring of a long stream of postdoctoral fellows as the Director of the Advanced Study Program (ASP).

Geoff Cheeseman (EOL) and Pat Munson (UCAR F&A) for professional excellence and innovativeness demonstrated during the acquisition of the HIAPER aircraft.

Chin-Hoh Moeng, Don Lenschow, Peter Sullivan, and Thomas Horst, “HATS: Field observations to obtain spatially filtered turbulence fields from crosswind arrays of sonic anemometers in the atmospheric surface layer” (published in 2004 in Journal of Atmospheric Science, 41, 1566–1581) and “Structure of subfilter-scale fluxes in the atmospheric surface layer with application to large-eddy simulation modeling” (published in 2003 in Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 482, 101–139).

Jim Wilson for providing meaningful mentorship to a broad range of people, from junior and senior scientists, administrators, and engineers to various levels of students.

Peggy Taylor for her professional excellence associated with field deployment logistics for four exceptionally challenging field programs.

Jerry Dryer, James Ellis, Ken Harris, Walt Hodshon, Ed Mores, Steve Palmer, Steve Rauenbuehler, Jose Rivas, Karl Schwenz, Bart Woodiel, David Allen, Jeff Bobka, and Clarke Chambellan for executing three separate, exceptionally complex and urgent projects (Passing Efficiency for the Low Turbulence Inlet (PELTI) Experiment, the University of Denver Low Turbulence Inlet (DULTI) Development, and the International H2O Project (IHOP 2002) development of an innovative antenna designed for a new mobile rapid scan radar).

Jeff Cole, Jothiram Vivekanandan, and Roy Rassmussen for for 2000: Common snowfall conditions associated with aircraft takeoff accidents. Journal of Aircraft 37, 110-116, and The estimation of snowfall rate using visibility, Journal of Applied Meteorology 38,1542Ä1563

Jon Lutz, Brian Lewis, Michl Howard, Paul Johnson, Mitch Randall, Eric Loew, Bob Rilling, Dick Oye, Mike Strong, Al Phinney, Joe Vinson, and Bart Woodiel for development of the S-Pol weather radar.

Terry Hock, Hal Cole, Dean Lauritsen, Ken Norris, Ned Chamberlain, Errol Korn, Chip Owens, Jim Franklin, Alan Goldstein and Jeff Smith for development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) dropsonde system.

Norm Zrubek for 30 years of dedication and technical excellence in aeronautical engineering at NCAR's Research Aviation Facility. 

Jack Fox and Jim Holt for their contribution to the Student Nitric Oxide Explorer (SNOE) initiative.

Mitch Randall, Eric Loew, and Joe Vinson for development of the PC integrated radar acquisition (PIRAQ) board and the VMEBus integrated acquisition (VIRAQ) board. 

Chuck Frush, Peter Hildebrand, Wen-Chau Lee, Eric Loew, Richard Neitzel, Rick Parsons, Mitch Randall, and Craig Walther for the development of the Electra Doppler Radar (ELDORA). 

Aref Nammari, Bruce Gandrud, Darrel Baumgardner, Diana Rogers, Jim Dye, Keith Barr, Kim Weaver, and Robert Knollenberg for development of the multiangle spectrometer probe.

Edward Brown for 30 years of support to the Research Aviation Facility.

Brigitte Baeuerle for her work on international logistics of the TOGA COARE project.

Anne-Leslie Barrett, David Carter, Hal Cole, Warner Ecklund, Terry Hock, Michl Howard, Charlie Martin, Mike Spowart, John Wilson for developing the Integrated Sounding System (ISS) network used in TOGA COARE.

Charlie Martin, Joost Businger, Steve Semmer, Tony Delany for development of the Atmosphere-Surface Turbulent Exchange Research Facility.

Charlie Martin, Joost Businger, Steve Semmer, Tony Delany for development of the Atmosphere-Surface Turbulent Exchange Research Facility.

Carmen Paneitz, Cathy Irwin, Errol Korn, and Kurt Knudson for deploying and maintaining surface and sounding systems.

Richard Bobka for 22 years of supporting field programs and maintaining equipment for the Atmospheric Technology Division.

Dean Lauritsen, Ken Norris, Sig Stenlund, Terry Hock, Tom Gardner, Vin Lally for creation of the lightweight long-range aid to navigation (Loran) digital dropwindsonde.

Bob Carl, Ed Ringleman, Harold Barber, and Jim Lundahl for long-term accomplishment in maintaining NCAR's air fleet

Fred Brock, George Saum, Michl Howard, Steven Semmer for their leadership in the design and development of the second- generation portable automated mesonet.

Walter Grotewold for 21 years of design and fabrication services

Edward Elsberry and Michl Howard for designing and supervising construction of the van for carrying the portable automated mesonet (PAM).

Harold Cole for his support to the Viking project meteorological team