November 30, 2011 | When I came to NCAR this summer from the University of Vienna to assume the EOL directorship, it definitely felt like homecoming. My career-long ties with NCAR started in the early 1990s when, as a graduate student, I participated in the NCAR-supported Hawaiian Rain­band Project (HaRP). Many visits to NCAR ensued: first in 1991 while I was still a graduate student at Yale, followed by an ASP postdoctoral appointment in 1995–97, and an ASP faculty fellow visit in 2007.

As an affiliate scientist, I have been visiting NCAR annually since 2009. Through these visits I had a lot of  opportunities to acquaint myself with different parts of this great organization. In coming back to lead EOL, the successor laboratory of the Atmospheric Technology Division (ATD) that supported HaRP in 1990, I came full circle, returning to the very part of NCAR that I got to know first.

EOL is also the part of NCAR that I got to know the best through close interactions with many of its outstanding staff over the years—interactions centered on planning and execution of field campaigns in which I've been involved in a number of capacities. Through my leadership of the Terrain-induced Rotor Experiment (T-REX), the most recent of these campaigns, and ensuing engagements with EOL through my affiliate scientist position and membership on the Observational Facility Assesment Panel (OFAP), I have been able to gain an in-depth view of the lab from many different angles.

As the director of EOL, I succeed Roger Wakimoto, who took on the role of NCAR director. The distinguished lineage of EOL and ATD directors also includes Rit Carbone, currently the EOL science advisor, and Bob Serafin, an NCAR director emeritus with an office in EOL a few doors down the hall from mine. It is a special honor for me to follow in their footsteps and lead a lab that I consider to be at the very core of NCAR's mission.

Since I assumed the directorship in July, EOL has marked a number of major achievements. I want to emphasize those in the deployment and development area, the two areas in which the lab excels.

HIPPO and DYNAMO. September saw the end of the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) of Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases Study and the beginning of the Dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (DYNAMO) project, two strikingly different yet both exceedingly complex field campaigns. In particular, HIPPO, with its operations spread over a three-year period, has come to symbolize the new paradigm of global operations, requiring novel approaches to field project support and management in EOL.

CO-LABS award. Over the last several years, EOL has carried out a number of innovations in dropsonde technology and deployment. These were recognized in November when NCAR received one of this year's four CO-LABS Governor's Awards for High-Impact Research. (See a related video.)

Both the successful completion of the NSF/NCAR Gulfstream V infrastructure modifications and instrumentation integration and the sustained development and transformation of dropsonde technology could not have happened without our expert in-house engineering research and development. These landmark achievements in the deployment and development area position EOL well in a new era encapsulated by the motto "higher, farther, longer."

As EOL prepares to respond to new challenges set out by the evolution of our science frontiers toward Earth system science and phenomena that lie at the weather-climate interface, it is most important to me that the lab remains forward-looking. One reflection of that is the vibrancy of in-house technical developments to meet new observational challenges. The other one is EOL's ability to anticipate where the new science frontiers will be in order to provide service in the future as well. With both of these, the true strength lies in the excellence of EOL staff, which I view to be the laboratory's most important asset. 

See all News