Thank You NOAA

Yesterday I submitted a final report for the last grant I received from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which ended on July 31.  This brings to an end 28 years of continuous funding from that agency, so I'd like to give a big thank you to NOAA, the NOAA/National Weather Service, and NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research for supporting the work of my graduate students and collaborators at the University of Utah and beyond.  

If my math is right, I've served as principal investigator (PI or lead scientist) or co-principal investigator (coPI or someone with shared leadership responsibilities) on 15 NOAA grants from 1998–2026.  In 1998, we began to receive annual grants from NOAA for weather support for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, including the installation of weather stations at Olympic Venues and around the Great Salt Lake, the creation of what became MesoWest (led by John Horel), the development of numerical and statistical forecasting systems for northern Utah, and a major field campaign to understand winter storms in the Wasatch Range known as IPEX.  Impacts of this work for regional and Olympic forecasting were described in a series of articles in the February 2002 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, coinciding with the 2002 Olympics.  

After the Olympics, we received a series of grants over the next 15 years or so from the National Weather Service Collaborative Science Technology and Applied Research (CSTAR) program, which was designed to transfer basic and applied research into operations through collaborative research between academic groups and National Weather Service Forecasters.  This work enabled continued expansion of MesoWest (led by John Horel) but also efforts to advance understanding of the meteorology of the western United States including the Great Salt Lake effect and atmospheric rivers.  

One key advancement during this period was improved understanding of the inland penetration of atmospheric rivers over the western United States.  This work was led by one of my graduate students, Jon Rutz, who also served as an intern at the National Weather Service while in graduate school.  His paper, Climatological Characteristics of Atmospheric Rivers and Their Inland Penetration over the western United States, published in 2014, has been cited more than 700 times and amongst other things illustrated key pathways for atmospheric river penetration into the western US interior.  It also illustrated the more "fickle" relationship between atmospheric rivers and precipitation over the interior compared to the coastal ranges, Cascade Mountains, and Sierra Nevada upstream.  This work is important not only for weather prediction, but also for understanding and projecting future changes in climate and snow hydrology over western mountain ranges.  

About ten years ago, as the CSTAR program was reaching an end, Justin Minder at SUNY Albany contacted me about a new opportunity at NOAA for winter weather funding.  This led to three more grants, the most recent ending on July 31, exploring ways to improve snowfall prediction not only over the western US, but across the continental United States.  This was a dream project for me.  Our most recent publication based on this work explores the use of machine learning to improve snow-to-liquid ratio prediction.

Readers of this blog have benefited from this work as many of the forecast techniques we've developed have been tested and evaluated on https://weather.utah.edu/.  The Utah Snow Ensemble, for example, could not have been developed without the capabilities developed with this NOAA funding.  We are working on upgrades to weather.utah.edu that will more prominently feature the many snow guidance products that we've developed over the years.  Below is a preview of what the new site will look like.

Our most recent proposal to NOAA to continue our work was recommended for funding but was ultimately unfunded due to cuts during the DOGE operations.  While disappointing, I've had an unusually productive run of NOAA funding and am grateful for 28 years of solid support.  I am also grateful for talented students and collaborators who have worked with us on these projects and made the journey fun and exciting.  All of my graduate students have benefited from NOAA funding and are now contributing to the success and growth of the weather enterprise.  Thanks again NOAA.