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GSL staff awards from Commerce and NOAA!

September 27, 2021

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Congratulations to the GSL team for these Department of Commerce and NOAA Awards!

Photo of John BrownNOAA Distinguished Career Award: John Brown “For a career devoted to scientific excellence and exemplary service by advancing numerical weather prediction and mentoring a generation of scientists.”

Photo of Forrest HobbsDepartment of Commerce Bronze Medal: Forrest Hobbs "For successful transition and award of $553M HPC Integrator contract 3 months ahead of schedule with no protests."

Photo of Jennifer Mahoney

  • Department of Commerce Bronze Medal: Jennifer Mahoney: "For expeditiously and skillfully coordinating research that leveraged the unique scientific opportunity resulting from the COVID-19 global pandemic."

  • NOAA Administrator's Award: Jennifer Mahoney "For the establishment of groundbreaking IT security practices to allow the use of NOAA sensitive data to maximize the effectiveness of partner high-performance computing systems for the advancement of NOAA science."


Photo of Georg GrellDepartment of Commerce Bronze Medal: Georg Grell: "For the development of the Global Ensemble Forecast System - Aerosols (GEFS-Aerosols) model to support air quality alerts and visibility forecasts." Li Zhang, Raffaele Montuoro, Haiqin Li, Stuart McKeen will be acknowledged by CIRES for their valuable role in GEFS-Aerosols. GEFS-Aerosols is an atmospheric composition model that integrates weather and air quality forecasting to produce week-long forecasts of aerosol components including wildfire smoke, soot, organic carbon, particulate sulfate, dust, sea salt, and volcanic ash.

Photo of Curtis Alexander Photo of Stan Benjamin Department of Commerce Bronze Medal: Stan Benjamin and Curtis Alexander: "For improving lake-effect snow and ice forecasts through the rapid transition of an innovative coupling of weather and coastal hydrodynamic models." They showed that using the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) data improves HRRR forecasts of lake-effect snow and general forecasts in all seasons over the Great Lakes region. In turn, HRRR forecasts are used to drive the FVCOM model over the Great Lakes, so HRRR weather forecast improvements lead to more accurate FVCOM predictions of lake conditions. Eric James and Tanya Smirnova will be acknowledged by CIRES for their role in developing this model