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FY2008 NAR Metrics – Highlights

Table of Contents

Field Campaigns | Editorships | External Committee Service | Presentations | Colloquia & Symposia | Workshops | Teaching Appointments | Graduate Advisors Thesis committee | NCAR Student Appointments | K-12 Outreach | Informal science education and presentations | Awards | Fellowships | Visitor Appointments | Publications | Collaborators

These metrics are qualitative and quantitative measurements and assessments of the productivity, quality, and impacts of NCAR programs and activities.

Field Campaigns (top) - Collecting field data has always been a scientist’s stock in trade. Direct observations shed insights on weather, climate, and related Earth-system phenomena. Ranging from a few weeks to several months, field campaigns (field-based observing missions or experiments) ensure successful data collection.

NCAR led or participated in 38 field campaigns in 15 countries and the United States. Locations ranged from the Amazon to the Arctic, and included more than 1,100 participants.

Editorships (top) – NCAR staff also serve as editors of publications. These positions recognize the appointee’s leadership in the field and serve a critical role in developing a given field’s future focus.

Sixty-one NCAR staff served in 86 different editorial roles in 57 journals. Publications included top tier journals such as Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres and Atmospheric Environment, to targeted journals such as Radio Science.

External Committee Service (top) – NCAR staff are called upon to participate in and often lead external scientific, technical, policy, and educational committees. These committees are instrumental to advancing and promoting the work of the scientific and technical community.

More than 145 NCAR staff served in a multitude of roles on 403 external committees for national and international scientific, education, and governmental organizations, including organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Positions ranged from Chair of the Board of Directors to Committee Advisor.

Presentations (top) – NCAR Staff give formal scientific and technical presentations about data, models, theories, hypotheses, reviews, and results.

Two-hundred-sixty-five NCAR staff made 1,740 scientific and technical presentations to audiences in the tens of thousands across the country and around world, from Fairbanks, Alaska to Beijing, China. Examples range from Tim Scheitlin’s Visualization Lab demo to U.S. Representative John Hall (D-NY), to a presentation on Large Eddy Simulation of an Idealized tropical cyclone at the AMS Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology by Yongsheng Chen (see: http://ams.confex.com/ams/28Hurricanes/techprogram/paper_138272.htm).

Colloquia & Symposia (top) – Smaller, often unilateral events, colloquia, symposia and tutorials focus primarily on education or training. This metric measures entire events that NCAR hosted alone, or co-hosted with other institutions or agencies.

NCAR sponsored 75 colloquia in Boulder and abroad, in countries including Turkey, Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Korea. Participants per session averaged out to 35, for a total audience of more than 2,745 peers and students. Some of the co-hosts include the University of Washington, NOAA, NASA, and the Seoul National University.

Workshops (top) – NCAR-hosted or -co-hosted workshops and conferences are generally larger, bilateral events convened for the purpose of discussion, consultation and exchange of views and information.

NCAR sponsored 109 workshops and conferences in seven countries and 10 U.S. states. We partnered with sponsors from the university community, such as Arizona State University and Cornell University, government agencies including NOAA and NASA, as well as with non-profit partners like the Sloan Foundation and the American Statistical Association. In total, these workshops and conferences reached close to 5,000 participants.

Teaching Appointments (top) – NCAR staff make important contributions through teaching appointments at institutions of higher education in positions ranging from Faculty Affiliate to Professor.

Teaching appointments at institutions of higher education currently number 59. Twenty-two percent of these appointments occur in nine countries around the world; 78% took place in 13 U.S. states including NCAR’s Super Computing partner, the University of Wyoming. Four years is the average tenure for current appointments, totaling more than 225 years of service.

Graduate Advisors (top) – NCAR staff serve as research advisors for graduate students around the world.

Of the 90 graduate students that have NCAR staff serving as graduate advisors, 26% hail from Colorado State University and the University of Colorado; 31% attend schools in 19 other states. The remaining 43% study at schools around the world, including four students from the University of Warsaw who are advised by Wojciech Grabowski.

Thesis committee (top) – NCAR staff serve as dissertation or thesis committee members for internal and external graduate students.

Twelve Master students and 90 PhD candidates work with 55 NCAR staff as they pursue their degrees from universities in 21 U.S. states; this includes 37 students from Colorado institutions. Twenty-nine students come from 17 countries, with German students leading the international count at eight.

NCAR Student Appointments (top) – Students also enjoy NCAR-based appointments.

In FY08, there were 56 student appointments: Eight were Graduate Students, nine Post-doctoral Fellows, 12 Graduate Research Assistants and 27 undergraduate Student Assistants appointments. These students hail from home institutions ranging from Denver’s Metro State College, to Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.

K-12 Outreach (top) –

Twenty-five NCAR Staff worked with K-12 students from more than 50 schools. Activities ranged from public lectures, to tours and field trips. Under-served and international students also benefitted from this volunteer effort, including schools in the Navajo Reservation school system and Julio, Argentina’s Escuela Provincial No. 38.

Informal science education and presentations (top) - NCAR scientists participate in educational activities in many other ways, including efforts such as student mentoring and contributing to provision of informal science education resources. Examples range from serving on an exhibit advisory committee, to providing and vetting science content in Web sites and modules, to supporting community outreach at local community events, including judging at a science fair and supporting Super Science Saturday.

This year’s count totaled more than 40 events. Among the highlights: Cory Wolff served as a Science Fair Judge in the Boulder schools, and Tim Lin presented on Education Soundings in West Lafayette, IN schools.

Awards (top) – Each year a number of NCAR Staff are honored for their work and contributions to the Atmospheric and related sciences. Fiscal year 2008 was an extraordinary year. In October of 2007, 59 NCAR staff received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC shared the award with Al Gore, Jr. for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Download the list of NCAR IPCC participants in the document, Saluting NCAR's participants on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Jeff Kiehl of CGD was also selected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). It is a special tribute for members who have made exceptional scientific contributions and attained acknowledged eminence in the Earth and space sciences. This honor may be bestowed on only 0.1% of the membership in any given year. Jeff received this award for his “major and lasting contributions to our understanding of the radiative forcing and feedback processes that govern climate change.” To learn more about the AGU go to http://www.agu.org/.

Fellowships (top) – a fellowship is typically a special appointment granting support for a term in order to support advanced research or study.

John Michalakes received a NVIDIA Graduate Internship from the NVIDIA Corporation. NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, which generates interactive graphics on workstations. NVIDIA offers internships and co-op terms year-round for undergraduate and graduate students who thrive on innovation and are passionate about developing cutting-edge technology. http://www.nvidia.com/page/fellowship_programs.html

Aaron Andersen was honored as a fellow by the Uptime Institute. Using benchmarking, abnormal incident data, and industry Best Practices collected from members of its knowledge communities, The Uptime Institute, Inc. (the Institute) has distilled uptime management into scientific disciplines and practices which can be confidently applied. The synergy of a knowledge community encourages more to be shared so that more is known, and then there is even more to be shared. This exponential increase in knowledge is facilitated by the Institute and its faculty of Distinguished Fellows. http://www.upsite.com/TUIpages/tuihome.html

Of particular note is the Leopold Leadership Fellowship, awarded to Patricia Romero-Lankao and Joan Kleypas. Each year, the Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment awards this Fellowship to up to 20 academic environmental scientists working in the United States and Canada. Through the program, Fellows learn to effectively communicate about science associated with complex environmental issues to a variety of audiences, including the media, policy makers, business leaders and other non-scientists. Leopold Fellows receive intensive experiential training, expert consultation, and peer networking to hone these skills. Today, more than 100 Leopold Leadership Fellows – Paty and Joanie included – are actively engaged in scientific outreach on a range of issues, from marine conservation science and river restoration ecology to the impacts of global climate change on human health. http://leopoldleadership.org/content/

Visitor Appointments (top) – Each year students, scientists, engineers, weather forecasters, and other professionals from around the country and world receive special visitor appointments from labs and programs across NCAR to collaborate with scientific, educational, or technical staff; conduct independent research; or participate in and/or oversee a professional project. Many receive financial support for their visits and some visitors temporarily join the NCAR staff.

NCAR Visitors hailed from 371 institutions, located in 47 different U.S. states and 37 different countries.

Publications (top) – A publication is an academic or technical work of writing containing original research results, reviews of existing results, or scholarship. “Refereed” publications undergo an editorial “blind” or anonymous process of peer review by one or more referees (who are experts in the same field) in order to check that the content of the paper is suitable for publication in the journal. A paper may undergo a series of reviews, edits and re-submissions before finally being accepted or rejected for publication. "Non-refereed" articles have been reviewed by editors or boards before being accepted for publication but have not gone through a formal blind review. Attached are NCAR’s referred and non-referred publications lists for the period October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008. Search for recent NCAR publications by author, date, keyword or status please go to the NCAR Publications database at: http://www.essl.ucar.edu/publications/index.php

For excellent library resources please go the NCAR Library Web site at: http://www.ucar.edu/library/

NCAR Refereed Publications: 521 (download PDF Bibliography)

NCAR Non-Refereed Publications: 253 (download PDF Bibliography)

UCAR Outstanding Publication Award

B. Stephens, K. Gurney, Pieter P. Tans, Colm Sweeney, Wouter Peters, Lori Bruhwiler, Philippe Ciais, Michel Ramonet, Philippe Bousquet, Takakiyo Nakazawa, Shuji Aoki, Toshinobu Machida, Gen Inoue, Nikolay Vinnichenko, Jon Lloyd, Armin Jordan, Martin Heimann, Olga Shibistova, Ray L. Langenfelds, L. Paul Steele, Roger J. Francey, and A. Scott Denning, 2007: Weak northern and strong tropical land carbon uptake from vertical profiles of atmospheric CO2. Science, 316, 1732-1735.

Past research has recognized that only half of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion stays there and called it the "missing carbon sink." This paper is the first to answer what happens to that CO2 – a longstanding mystery of the global carbon cycle – and concludes that the missing carbon sink does not exist. The finding has energized the carbon cycle community to test these conclusions.

Collaborators (top) – NCAR defines collaborators using the National Science Foundation’s definition of partner organizations as being “academic institutions, other nonprofits, industrial or commercial firms, state or local governments, and schools or school systems that have been involved with NSF base-funded projects.” Partner Organizations may provide financial or in-kind support, supply facilities or equipment, collaborate in research exchange personnel or otherwise contribute project support.

NCAR Collaborators come from 714 institutions, which are located in all 50 states, and 62 countries including 260 universities and local and national organizations. These range from the Denver Botanic Gardens to the India Meteorological Department.

For a full list of each metrics topic, download NCAR 2007-2008 Metrics Details.xls