Interview with: Carl S. Bullock, Meteorologist with the Forecast Systems Laboratory AWIPS Development
Interview conducted June 2010
Run time: 1:04:36
Topics:  PROFS, AWIPS Requirements, the people behind AWIPS and the modernization

Dave Waltman, a long-time resident of Boulder, Colorado, has had a diverse and interesting career. Born in St. Louis, he spent his early years as a suburbanite in both St. Louis and Chicago. Following in his brother's footsteps, Waltman attended Purdue University, where his father, a native Hoosier and engineer, had also studied. However, Waltman did not find engineering to his liking and transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in business.

Interview with Dennis S. Walts, former NWS Meteorologist assigned to the Forecast Systems Laboratory AWIPS Development Team
Interview conducted June 2010
Run time: 40:35
Topics: PROFS, AWIPS, Role of Research

Douglas K. Lilly was a renowned meteorologist who had a significant impact on the field of atmospheric sciences. Although Lilly completed his undergraduate work in physics at Stanford University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, he always envisioned going into meteorology.

Dr. Russell Schnell is a distinguished scientist with a remarkable career dedicated to environmental research and monitoring. His journey began as a teenager when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadet squadron. At the age of 18, he embarked on his first international trip as part of the inaugural Air Cadet exchange program with Israel. During his first year of graduate studies in 1968, Dr. Schnell made a groundbreaking discovery of biological ice nuclei, which has now become a distinct and actively researched field.

Harriet B. Crowe, born Harriet Barker in 1938, was raised in Mt. Cisco, New York. She was the first member of her family to attend college, a significant achievement given that neither her parents nor their siblings had the opportunity to pursue higher education. Crowe initially attended Michigan State University in 1956 with the intention of studying nursing, a decision influenced by her high school counselor who discouraged her from pursuing her original ambition of becoming a doctor.

Topics include: Mesa Lab site; time on Boulder City Council; time in Climax; Boulder's open space policy; Walter Orr Roberts; Mesa Lab construction; I.M. Pei; fund raising; HAO; Mesa Lab design; computers; roof leaks; Aspen Institute; music; the humanities and science.

Copyright Information: Copyright University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Oral history interview with Karyn Sawyer, 2015. Interviewed by Richard Anthes. Forms part of the UCAR/NCAR Oral History Collection. Long-time UCAR/NCAR staff member Karyn Sawyer reflects on her decades-long career at the organization, including how she came to work for NCAR, field projects, international scientific cooperation, UCAR/NCAR administration, and her management style.

Discussion with Mary Haley, David (Dave) Brown, and Dennis Shea about the development and use of NCAR Command Language (NCL). NCL, produced by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) and is a free interpreted language designed specifically for scientific data processing and visualization. Topics included in this discussion also include: NCAR Graphics, netCDF, GRIB, Fortran, C, Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, Community Climate Model, NCL workshops, PyNIO, PyNGL, MATLAB, NumPy, xarray, R, and Python.

Nelder Medrud begins the interview with a discussion of his life history, education and research prior to arriving at NCAR. Medrud became acquainted with NCAR through Phil Thompson and Henry van de Boogaard while at the University of Stockholm, Sweden in the early 1960s. In the Air Force, Medrud’s specialty was applied climatology and a position opened up at NCAR focusing on applications to societal problems. The immediate focus of Medrud’s work at NCAR was on the matter of the consequences of hail to society.