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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11699.
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Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

Raymond J. Ban (Chair) is Executive Vice President of Meteorology Science and Strategy at The Weather Channel, Inc. (TWC). He is responsible for the meteorological quality and integrity of all TWC’s products and services, and for growing TWC’s relationships with the weather community across the entire weather climate enterprise. Prior to joining TWC in 1982, he worked as an operational weather forecaster at AccuWeather, Inc. from 1973 to 1982. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in meteorology. He has been an active member of the AMS for over 30 years. He holds both the Television and Radio Seal of Approval from the Society. Previously Ray was the Commissioner on Professional Affairs for the AMS for 6 years and is now serving on the Steering Committee of the AMS Commission on The Weather and Climate Enterprise. He was named a Centennial Fellow of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, an Alumni Fellow of Penn State University, has served on the Board of Atmospheric Science and Climate of the National Academy of Sciences and has also served as President of the Alumni Board of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State. Additionally, Mr. Ban is currently a member of the advisory board to NCAR and the NCAR Societal Impacts Program and serves on the Board of Visitors of The College of Geosciences at the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Ban is Co-Chair of The Weather Coalition and sits on the Board of Directors of the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation. He is a past member of the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET) Advisory Panel and the research and Technical Committee of the Southeast Region Climate Center.


John T. Andrew is Chief of Special Planning Projects for the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), where his current projects focus primarily on various aspects of California’s hydrology. Prior to his current position with DWR, Mr. Andrew was the water quality manager and Southern California regional coordinator for the California Bay-Delta Authority, and before that he served as Chief of Fish Facilities for DWR’s Environmental Services Office. He has also worked for the California Department of Health Services, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Mr. Andrew holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in public policy, both from the University of California at Berkeley.


Barbara G. Brown is project scientist in the Research Applications Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her research interests include weather and climate applications of statistics, including forecast verification and development of new verification approaches; probability forecasts and forecast uncertainty; measuring user needs and forecast value; forecast communication; statistical forecasting methods; and weather and climate extremes. She is chair of the World Meteorological Organization’s Joint Working Group on Verification and Associate Editor of Weather and Forecasting. Ms. Brown has a bachelor’s degree in statistics from Colorado State University and master’s degrees in environmental sciences and statistics from the University of Virginia and Oregon State University, respectively.


David Changnon is an associate professor in the Meteorology Program of the Department of Geography, Northern Illinois University. Dr. Changnon’s research activities involve applied climatology, hydroclimatic variability, and synoptic climatology. He examines climate variability and extremes and their impacts in the United States, assesses the use of climate information by weather-sensitive decision makers, and develops climate-related decision-support tools for users in climate-sensitive areas such as utilities, agribusiness, recreation, transportation, and water resources. Dr. Changnon has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Illinois and master’s and doctoral degrees in atmospheric sciences from Colorado State University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11699.
×

Konstantine Georgakakos is the Managing Director of the Hydrologic Research Center in San Diego, California. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego, and with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Iowa, Iowa City. His research activities have included interfacing ensemble and probabilistic forecasting with decision models for multiobjective reservoir management and agriculture in Northern California. He has also developed measures of utility of uncertain surface meteorological forecasts for hydrologic and water resources applications by propagating uncertainty in coupled systems and in downscaling, and producing probabilistic diagnostic indices for utilizing climate and weather ensemble model forecasts. He has led the development of operational forecast and management systems in Northern California, at the Panama Canal, over the Nile River basin, in Korea, and in Central America as part of the technology transfer programs of the Hydrologic Research Center. Dr. Georgakakos holds a degree in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and master’s and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


James Hansen is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics, prediction, predictability, data assimilation, targeted observations, probabilistic forecasting, ensemble assessment, and the impact of model inadequacies. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union, European Geophysical Society, and Royal Meteorological Society. Dr. Hansen holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado and a doctoral degree in atmospheric physics from Oxford University.


Ronald N. Keener, Jr., is Meteorology Manager at Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina. He provides weather forecast and climate support services in support of generation load forecasting, energy trading and marketing, hydroelectric operation and planning, emergency response organizations, and project planning and development. Previously he was an Engineering Specialist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he participated in fluid modeling studies that supported boundary-layer model development for air quality modeling. He is a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the Nuclear Meteorology Users Group, and the Planetary Society. He is also a member of the Board of Certified Consulting Meteorologists and the U.S. Weather Research Program. He additionally served as Program Chair for the 2001 AMS Annual Meeting and Symposium Chair for the 2000 AMS Meeting on Environmental Applications, and is a past member of the AMS Private Sector Board.


Upmanu Lall is Professor and Chair of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. His principal areas of expertise are statistical and numerical modeling of hydrologic and climatic systems and water resource systems planning and management. He has over 25 years of experience as a hydrologist. He has been the principal investigator on a number of research projects funded by the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Air Force, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Energy, and Utah and Florida state agencies. These projects have covered water quantity and quality and energy resource management, flood analysis, groundwater modeling and subsurface characterization, climate modeling and the development of statistical and mathematical modeling methods. He has been involved as a consultant with specialization in groundwater flow and contaminant transport modeling covering mining operations, streamflow modeling and water balance, risk and environmental impact assessment, site hydrologic evaluation and as a reviewer and as an expert on a number of other hydrologic problems. He has also taught over 20 distinct university courses.


Clifford F. Mass is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. in 1974 in physics at Cornell and his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in 1978. He has been a faculty member at the University of Washington since 1981. His research interests include synoptic and mesoscale forecasting techniques, regional weather phenomena, and mesoscale modeling using the Penn State-NCAR MM5 modeling system. He works with ensemble prediction, including maintaining a real-time mesoscale ensemble system and involvement with the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative on predictability, and has collaborated for many years with the National Weather Service (NWS) on regional forecasting problems. He currently leads a research group that has studied a wide variety of topics, including heavy precipitation and flooding, wind and snow storms, numerical forecasting strategies, as well as weather phenomena unique to western North America. Dr. Mass also leads the real-time MM5 forecasting effort at the University of Washington.


Rebecca E. Morss is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, with a joint appointment in the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division and the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment. Her research interests include atmospheric science, socioeconomic, and public policy aspects of observing network design for weather and El Niño prediction; atmospheric predictability; and improving weather information to meet diverse societal needs. Dr. Morss is also involved in building a collaborative program based at NCAR to understand the use and value of weather forecasts and con-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11699.
×

nect weather forecasts with user needs, and in developing the Societal and Economic Applications component of the international THORPEX program (under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization). She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Robert T. Ryan has been chief meteorologist at NBC4 in Washington, D.C., since 1980. Before joining NBC4 he was a research meteorologist with Arthur D. Little Inc. in Cambridge and worked as a broadcast meteorologist in Providence, Boston, and on the Today show. He has served as the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Chair of the Committee of Broadcast Meteorology, Commissioner of Professional Affairs, Member of the Council of the Society, and in 1996 was elected President of the AMS. Additionally, Mr. Ryan has been called to testify before various committees of Congress and recently served on the National Academies’ Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and on its Committee on Partnerships in Weather and Climate Services and the NSF Advisory Committee for Geosciences. He has also served as executive editor of Weatherwise magazine for many years. Mr. Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in atmospheric sciences from the State University of New York at Albany.


Elke U. Weber is the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business in the Management Division of Columbia Business School and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. Dr. Weber’s M.A. and Ph.D. in Behavior and Decision Analysis are from Harvard University. Over the past 20 years, she has held academic positions in the United States (University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Ohio State University) and Europe (Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Corporate Management). Dr. Weber spent a year (1992/1993) at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and half a year (2002) at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Center for Advanced Study) in Berlin. She is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty. Recently Dr. Weber has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental decision making and policy. She is past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and served on two committees of the National Academies. Dr. Weber has edited two major decision journals and currently serves or has served on the editorial boards of eight other psychology and policy journals. At Columbia, she founded and codirects the Center for the Decision Sciences, which fosters and facilitates cross-disciplinary research and graduate training in the basic and applied decision sciences, and recently founded the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, which investigates ways of facilitating human adaptation to climate change and climate variability and is financed by the National Science Foundation.

NRC Staff

Paul Cutler (Study Director) is a senior program officer for the Polar Research Board of the National Academies. He directs studies in the areas of polar science and atmospheric science. Before joining the Polar Research Board staff, Dr. Cutler was a senior program officer in the Academies’ Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, where he directed the Mapping Science Committee and studies in Earth science and geographic information science. Before joining the Academies, he was an assistant scientist and lecturer in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research is in glaciology, hydrology, meteorology, and quaternary science, and he has conducted fieldwork in Alaska, Antarctica, arctic Sweden, the Swiss Alps, Pakistan’s Karakoram mountains, the midwestern United States, and the Canadian Rockies. Dr. Cutler received an M.Sc. in geography from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Minnesota.


Leah Probst is a research associate with the NRC’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. She works on a wide variety of studies, including issues such as air quality, climate, ecology, and wildlife management. A former resident of Alaska, Ms. Probst has returned to Alaska many times through her work at the NRC, visiting numerous regions of the state and learning about environmental issues unique to Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.


Rob Greenway has been a program assistant at the National Academies since 1998. He has worked on NRC studies that produced the reports Assessment of the Benefits of Extending the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission: A Perspective from the Research and Operations Communities, Review of NOAA’s Plan for the Scientific Stewardship Program, and Where the Weather Meets the Road: A Research Agenda for Improving Road Weather Services, among others. He received his A.B. in English and his M.Ed. in English education from the University of Georgia.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11699.
×
Page 110
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11699.
×
Page 111
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11699.
×
Page 112
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Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of weather, seasonal climate, and hydrological prediction, and no forecast is complete without a description of its uncertainty. Effective communication of uncertainty helps people better understand the likelihood of a particular event and improves their ability to make decisions based on the forecast. Nonetheless, for decades, users of these forecasts have been conditioned to receive incomplete information about uncertainty. They have become used to single-valued (deterministic) forecasts (e.g., "the high temperature will be 70 degrees Farenheit 9 days from now") and applied their own experience in determining how much confidence to place in the forecast. Most forecast products from the public and private sectors, including those from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service, continue this deterministic legacy. Fortunately, the National Weather Service and others in the prediction community have recognized the need to view uncertainty as a fundamental part of forecasts. By partnering with other segments of the community to understand user needs, generate relevant and rich informational products, and utilize effective communication vehicles, the National Weather Service can take a leading role in the transition to widespread, effective incorporation of uncertainty information into predictions. "Completing the Forecast" makes recommendations to the National Weather Service and the broader prediction community on how to make this transition.

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