The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recognized several ESSIC-CICSMD affilated researchers this month, through it’s NOAA/NESDIS/STAR Awards program.
The awards highlighted researchers based on outstanding performances in areas such as published works, leadership and teamwork.
Noteworthy local recipients included Drs. Yong Chen and Likun Wang, both assistant research scientists at UMD ESSIC, as well as visiting associate research scientists Dr. Huan Meng and Ralph Ferraro, both of the CoRP, Satellite Climate Studies Branch. All four scientists are part of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS-MD).
Officials from NOAA, as well as its branching organizations, the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and the Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), used nominations across various scientific departments and organizations in their choosing of award recipients.
Researchers could not nominate colleagues within the same direct groups or organizations and NOAA kept the identity of the nominators hidden from the awards’ winners.
Ferraro stated that his award for “leadership to provide the highest quality global precipitation measurements supporting critical weather and climate applications,” came on the foot-heels of his efforts to both increase NOAA’s access to data and instruments and to facilitate interactions between NOAA and NASA.
“I think for me its an honor to be sort of recognized by your peers and management about the work you’ve done,” Ferraro said. “My job is to kind of guide some science and do some of that myself, but I’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches trying to do a lot of the [facilitation]. I don’t know who in STAR nominated me for that, but it is nice for people to recognize that.”
Despite the secrecy, many of the award winners were happy to have been acknowledged.
According to Wang, his work on satellite calibration and careful data processing is often critical to other large scale projects, but can be tedious and is often difficult to get published.
“It’s nice that they noticed the people behind the scenes,”Wang said, who along with his reasearch group won awards for a published paper and teamwork.
(For a full listing of the award recipiants, including additional information, please see the following article on the CICS-MD web-site.
