Appendix G
Committee and Staff Biographies
Paul L. Smith (chair) is a past director (1981–1996) of the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and is now a professor emeritus. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). He served as chief scientist at Air Weather Service (AWS) Headquarters, Scott Air Force Base, during 1974–1975 and received the Award for Meritorious Civilian Service for his contributions to the AWS radar program. He served on the Executive Committee of the International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation from 1988 to 1996, as director of the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium from 1991 to 1996, as a member of the National Research Council’s National Weather Service (NWS) Modernization Committee from 1997 to 1999, and as chair of the NRC Committee on Weather Radar Technology beyond NEXRAD from 2001 to 2002. He currently serves on the NEXRAD Technical Advisory Committee. His major research interests are in radar meteorology, cloud physics, and weather modification. He manages the armored T-28 research aircraft facility and has worked on the development of various types of meteorological instrumentation. Dr. Smith is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and chaired the AMS Committee on Radar Meteorology on two separate occasions. He received the 1992 Editor’s Award from the AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology. He is a member of the Weather Modification Association (receiving its 1995 Thunderbird Award), a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of Sigma Xi.
Ana P. Barros is a professor at Duke University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Her research interest is in investigating the dynamics of water presence and water pathways in the environment. The goal is to improve understanding of the physics of the hydrological cycle at all spatial and temporal scales, and to apply this new knowledge to research and
develop technologies for environmental assessment, prediction and control. Barros’s work is interdisciplinary and addresses fundamental engineering science questions in the areas of climate, hydrometeorology, geomorphology, ecology, hydraulics and hydrology, and their linkages to the environmental engineering sciences. Her research activities are conducted using computer models, signal processing and exploratory data analysis, and laboratory and field experiments. She previously served on the NRC Committee on U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Water Resources Research, 1997–2000.
V. Chandrasekar is a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Colorado State University (CSU), where he received his Ph.D. Dr. Chandrasekar has been involved with weather radar systems for more than 20 years and has about 25 years of experience in radar systems. Dr. Chandrasekar has played a key role in developing the CSU-CHILL radar as one of the most advanced meteorological radar systems available for research, and he continues to work actively with the CSU-CHILL radar supporting its research and education mission. He specializes in developing new radar technologies and techniques for solving meteorological problems and has actively pursued applications of polarimetry for cloud microphysical applications, as well as neural network-based radar rainfall estimates and fuzzy logic systems for hydrometeor identification. Dr. Chandrasekar is an avid experimentalist conducting experiments to collect in situ observations to verify the new techniques and technologies. He is coauthor of two textbooks, Polarimetric Doppler Weather Radar: Principles and Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Introduction to Probability and Random Processes (McGraw Hill, 1997). He is a fellow of the IEEE and recipient of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) technical achievement award.
Gregory S. Forbes earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago where he studied tornadoes and severe thunderstorms under Dr. Theodore Fujita—world famous for his invention of the F-scale used to rate tornadoes. From 1978 to 1999, Forbes was a member of the meteorology faculty at Pennsylvania State University and taught courses in weather analysis, forecasting, hydrometeorology, and natural disasters. He has been involved in numerous field measurement programs that included Doppler radars and was lead forecaster for some of these projects. Forbes has used NEXRAD, research multiparameter, and phased-array radar data to evaluate various weather situations. In June 1999, he joined the operational forecasting team at the Weather Channel as its severe weather expert. Forbes is a fellow of the AMS
and a present or past member of AMS committees on severe local storms and weather analysis and forecasting.
Eve Gruntfest is professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She has been working in the field of natural hazard mitigation for more than 25 years, has published widely, and is an internationally recognized expert in the specialty areas of warning system development and flash flooding. Gruntfest is coeditor of Coping with Flash Floods, which brings together papers from leading experts who participated at the 1999 NATO Advanced Studies Institute that she organized and held in Ravello, Italy. She has participated in numerous workshops sharing lessons from research on warning systems and flash flooding. Her current research project aims to change how we warn for short fuse events including flash floods and tornadoes to account for new data sources, new technologies, and new urban demographies.
Witold F. Krajewski is the Rose & Joseph Summers Professor of Water Resources Engineering at the University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. from Warsaw University of Technology, Poland, in environmental engineering and water resources systems. He was a research hydrologist at the Office of Hydrology of the National Weather Service until 1987 when he joined the University of Iowa. His scientific interests concern multiple aspects of rainfall measuring, modeling, forecasting, and estimation using radar and satellite remote sensing. His current research focuses on modeling uncertainty of multisensor rainfall estimation at a range of temporal and spatial scales. His other work includes optimal estimation and control of water resources and environmental systems. He has published nearly 100 papers in refereed journals. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He has served on numerous committees and panels of these and other professional organizations and on the editorial boards of several journals. He is a coeditor of Advances in Water Resources.
Thomas D. Potter is professor of meteorology, emeritus at the University of Utah. He earned his Ph.D. in 1962 from Pennsylvania State University. He spent 23 years in the Air Weather Service, retiring in 1974 as the vice commander of a 10,000 person organization. He then joined the faculty at St. Louis University for 2 years, teaching and doing research in meteorology. From there he became director of the NOAA National Climate Center (now the National Climatic Data Center [NCDC]) in Asheville, North Carolina, for 2 years. Potter was asked to transfer to Washington, D.C., as deputy
director and later director of the Environmental Data and Information Service. In 1982 he moved to Geneva as the first director of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) World Climate Program and later became director of the World Weather Watch Department. Returning to the United States in 1989, he became regional director of the NWS Western Region, implementing the NWS modernization, bringing in new technology and training his people to use it effectively. In 1998, he retired from NWS and joined the University of Utah Meteorology Department as a professor, director of the Cooperative Institute for Regional Prediction, and the leader of the Weather Support Unit for the 2002 Olympics held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Potter is a founding member of Atmospheric Science Advisors, a consulting firm. He is also coeditor of the recent Wiley Handbook of Weather, Climate, and Water, and fellow of the AMS, American Indian Science and Engineering Society, and Pennsylvania State University and a member of Sigma Xi.
Rita Roberts is a project scientist with the Research Applications Program (RAP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Rita has extensive experience in analyzing Doppler and polarimetric radar data as well experience in radar siting. She also has used NEXRAD data for flash flood forecasting. Rita is the incoming chairperson for the AMS Committee on Radar Meteorology. In addition to radar meteorology, her other interests include tornado research and thunderstorm nowcasting. Before joining RAP, Roberts worked on the Joint Airport Weather Studies Project, which focused on microbursts and wind shear. She received an M.S. in atmospheric science from Colorado State University in 1998.
Matthias Steiner is a senior research scientist affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in environmental sciences (with emphasis in atmospheric science) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Dr. Steiner’s research interests reach across hydrometeorology, cloud and precipitation physics, mountain meteorology, and radar and satellite meteorology. He is intrigued by the variability of precipitation in space and time and how to measure precipitation with in situ as well as remote sensing instruments. His recent work is focused on understanding the effect of atmospheric moisture on the flow of air within and over complex terrain, and the associated cloud and precipitation processes. Dr. Steiner has been contributing to several interdisciplinary, national, and international field experiments and programs, such as the Mesoscale Alpine Program (MAP), the Tropical Rainfall Measur-
ing Mission (TRMM), and the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE). His work has been published in the leading journals of major professional societies on three continents. Dr. Steiner just completed serving two terms on the AMS Committee on Radar Meteorology. At present, he chairs the Technical Committee on Precipitation of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Hydrology Section, and he is a member of the Precipitation Missions Science Team of NASA. He is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and was the recipient of the 2002 Editor’s Award for the AMS Journal of Hydrometeorology.
Roger M. Wakimoto is a professor and the former chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in geophysical science from the University of Chicago. His professional interests include research and field work in mesometeorology with particular emphasis in severe convective phenomena. Dr. Wakimoto has been a part of or co-principal investigator for numerous field experiments, including VORTEX (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) and FASTEX (Fronts and Atlantic Storm Track Experiment). Presently he serves on the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction Advisory Panel and the AMS Committee on Radar Meteorology. He is also an associate editor of Monthly Weather Review, and a member of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.
Staff
Julie Demuth is a program officer for the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC). She received her B.S. in meteorology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her M.S. in atmospheric science from Colorado State University. Her master’s research focused on developing techniques for objectively estimating the intensity and wind structure of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and East Pacific basins using microwave sounding data. The intensity estimation algorithm is now being run operationally by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center during the tropical season. Since joining BASC in March 2003, Julie has worked on studies involving atmospheric dispersion of hazardous materials, weather modification, and road weather research.
Elizabeth A. Galinis is a senior program assistant for the Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. She received her B.S. in marine science from the University of South Carolina in 2001. Since her start at the National
