Priority 3: Improving Public Awareness and Understanding

This strategic priority and the previous one (enhancing formal science education) are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they overlap in significant ways. Many NCAR conferences, colloquia, and workshops are advertised and open to the public. These events enhance public awareness and understanding of the atmospheric sciences by building human and institutional capacity to deal with climate issues.

Accomplishments

During FY 2006, NCAR organized more than 250 national and international workshops and colloquia (See workshops and colloquia metrics). During FY 2006, NCAR organized more than 250 national and international workshops and colloquia. Additionally, our website provides a vast amount of information on current activities, findings, and information of interest for our community of researchers but also has several pages written to introduce our programs to the general public. The Windows to the Universe website, mentioned above, provides one of NCAR's strongest tools for reaching a large, global, and bilingual audience of interested learners. The website continues to be the most highly visited website within the entire ucar.edu domain. Over the past year, the traffic has continued to grow dramatically. The number of visitors to the site during FY06 grew by 48% to more than 14.7 million visitors, while page view tallies grew by 53% to more than 125 million page views during the same period. Traffic to the NCAR funded Spanish-language portions of the site grew even more dramatically. Visitors were up about 82% to 4.3 million, while page view counts increased by 73% to 21.2 million.

NCAR continues to support the HIAPER documentation project to capture milestones in the modification of the NSF's Gulfstream V aircraft to become the High-Performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research (HIAPER). With new support form the NSF in 2006, EO documented in High Definition Video (HDV) the first field campaign utilizing HIAPER. This research project, known as T-REX (Terrain-Induced Rotor Experiment), occurred during March and April 2006 in the Owens Valley, California. Interviews with Project PI and other T-REX scientists were filmed by Geoffrey Haines-Stile Productions, as they planned complex logistic, identified ideal weather conditions for rotors, made observations using ground-based and airborne instruments, and reviewed the campaign's scientific findings. With support from NSF, NCAR, and Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation, EO also arranged for the first ever aerial photography of HIAPER as it soared over snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada . Video sequences have been disseminated to the media by UCAR Communications and the NSF Office of Legislative and Public Affairs.

Program Plan

NCAR will continue to host national and international workshops and colloquia. In particular, we look forward to the NCAR's Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) workshops. IMAGe will host 'Statistics for Numerical Models' as its Theme of the Year for FY 2007. Four workshops will apply statistical science to interpret the complicated multivariate, spatial and temporal data sets used by the massive numerical experiments that are now the norm in the geosciences. The next meeting of NCAR's national workshop on Geoscience Application Requirements for Petascale Systems (GARPA) will take place springing January, 2007 to produce recommendations for further actions to establish the needs of geoscience applications and provide them to the sponsoring NSF program officers. NCAR provides training workshops in its open source visualization software NCL (NCAR Command Language) every year. Four will be given in FY 2007: one at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Climate Center (APCC) in Busan, South Korea, and three at NCAR. Again in Annecy, France, NCAR will plan and program the 2007 international workshop Computing in Atmospheric Sciences. This workshop brings together international colleagues to discuss information technology advances and the transformative infrastructure that allows scientists to investigate atmospheric problems as part of the Earth system model. In FY07, Windows to the Universe development sponsored by NCAR will focus on topics associated with the IPY, as well as biogeoscience. We anticipate growth in use of the website will continue to grow dramatically, as it has over the past several years. EO will continue to seek funding to support the documentation of research campaigns involving NCAR scientists and NSF-supported observing facilities, especially the GV (HIAPER). The goal continues to be to enhance public understanding of the scientific endeavor, the use of cutting-edge technology, and the diversity of individuals and fascinating careers that contribute to Earth-Sun system science. A finished thirty minute video will be produced early in November. Video sequences have been disseminated to the media by UCAR Communications and the NSF Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. A finished 30-minute video will be completed in early November 2006 for use in public presentations and television broadcasting.