Testimonials: Faculty Fellowship Program

Sunil Khatri
Texas A&M University

The Faculty Fellowship has been a tremendously rewarding experience for me. I have come away with a high regard for the depth and breadth of the work being conducted at NCAR. I also found the NCAR personnel to be extremely competent, and easy to get along with. With their engagement, we were fortunate to complete the design of the two reconfigurable radar signal processing engines. We hope to test these on NCAR's radars at the earliest.

My student Suganth has matured significantly as a researcher through his participation in this program. Further, I feel that I came away with some ideas, through our summer work at NCAR, which would form the seeds of some new research initiatives in my group. We plan to submit two publications with NCAR personnel, based on our summer work.

Hatim Sharif
The University of Texas at San Antonio

The faculty fellowship was an excellent opportunity to interact with and benefit from NCAR scientists. Moreover, NCAR resources were available for me during this visit. I have started, and continued, collaboration with several scientists at RAL. Collaboration resulted in one funded collaborative proposal to NOAA (100 K), one submitted proposal (83k), one submitted LOI, two submitted conference abstracts, and four ongoing studies. I had the chance to present my work through two seminars at NCAR. I work on hydrologic analysis and forecasting and close collaboration with NCAR hodrometeorologists has tremendous potential. I also learned that ASP has a program for graduate students which I will definitely recommend to my students. I also plan to send some students to SOARS. Last, but not least, the cheerful help from ASP staff was invaluable.

Paquita Zuidema
University of Miami

The Faculty Fellowship Program allowed me to spend the summer of 2006 at NCAR, in between the spring and fall academic semesters of the University of Miami . I collaborated with my host, Junhong Wang, on a project to further understand the temperature inversion capping the subtropical marine boundary layer in the south-eastern Pacific as characterized by rawindsondes, and to discriminate between the behavior of different Vaisala sounding types. The project is on-going, with the goal to publish
a note on our results when they are finalized.

The program was a wonderful experience. Although I have previously lived in Boulder , this program allowed me a physical presence at NCAR for the first time. The opportunity to develop a collaboration with Junhong Wang, whose abilities I have long admired, was very valuable to me. The facilities and work space were more than adequate, the staff professional and friendly.  The ready access to NCAR seminars and scientists was extremely enriching, and opened doors for valuable potential future collaborations. I want to thank Junhong Wang for suggesting that I apply to this program, and thank the program for creating and facilitating such faculty visits. I expect I will apply again, both to finish the work begun this past summer, and because NCAR provided such a hospitable and productive environment.

Jan Mandel
University of Colorado, Denver

The fellowship at NCAR has allowed me to start on gaining background in atmospheric science, in addition to one month of continued NSF funded work with Janice Coen on wildfire simulation. We have made good progress on formulating a PDE based model. The report [2] from this work is about to be finished. During the fellowship, I have completed two other reports [1,3], which are archived at a CU Denver website. The computations for the report were done using NCAR and Teragrid resources. All three reports acknowledge the NCAR support.

My student, Jonathan Beezley, went to the WRF course, and he succesfully installed WRF on Linux with Intel compiler. This platform is not supported so it took quite a few modifications. I have studied WRF from online resources with Jonathan's help. By now, we are perhaps 50% on the way to understand what is happening during the various stages of preprocessing and how to use WRF for research.

The work on fire model and on the report [2] led me also to the study of reaction-diffusion differential equations, and properties of their solutions, such as moving fronts.

[1] Jan Mandel and Vaibhav Kulkarni, "Construction of a Level Function for Fireline Data Assimilation", CCM Report 234
[2] Jan Mandel, Lynn S. Bennethum, Jonathan Beezley, Janice L. Coen, Craig C. Douglas, Leopoldo P. Franca, Minjeong Kim, and Anthony Vodacek, "A Wildfire Model with Data Assimilation", CCM Report 233
[3] Jan Mandel and Jonathan D. Beezley, "Predictor-Corrector Ensemble Filters for the Assimilation of Sparse Data into High Dimensional Nonlinear Systems", CCM Report 232