To: Atmospheric Sciences faculty, students, and staff. From: Greg Hakim. Subject: 2006 UCAR Members Meeting. On 10--11 October I attended the UCAR Annual Members Meeting as a representative of UW. In accordance with my responsibilities as a Members Representative, I am sending this (long) email to report to you on the activities of this meeting. As I have done in previous reports, I'll preface my summary with a little background for those not familiar with UCAR; you may skip to the next paragraph if you're familiar with UCAR. UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) is a non-profit corporation that has, among other things, a term contract with the NSF to oversee NCAR. UCAR has a board of directors, called Trustees, that manage the business of UCAR by interacting with the executives of the corporation. These Trustees are elected by representatives of the stakeholders, who are the member institutions that pay dues for these privileges. The annual meeting provides the opportunity for members to elect Trustees and receive briefings on the activities of UCAR and NCAR during the past year. The main topic this year was preparation for the first-ever competition to manage NCAR, which will take place in 2007. It is important to note that this will have little to no effect on NCAR, as will be explained more fully below. NSF is advertising an open competition, which means it is possible that an organization other than UCAR could win the right to manage NCAR. If that were to happen, UCAR would retain the rights to the extensive collection of programs that it has created at NCAR over the years (e.g. Unidata, COMET, COSMIC, JOSS, etc.), and could move them elsewhere. I view this is a substantial "poison pill" toward awarding the contract to a non-UCAR organization. The meeting began with a series of reports, the first of which was from the UCAR treasurer. Of NCAR's 2006 total annual budget of $293M, $156M comes from NSF, $101M from non-NSF government funds ($37M NOAA, $30M NASA, $18M DOD, $14M FAA), and $35M from other sources. The total budget is roughly unchanged from 2005. Kelvin Droegemeier, Chair of the UCAR Board of Trustees, gave a summary of the Board's activities. There is a new "endowed senior scientist position" in RAL, which they anticipate will be held by an individual scientist for up to a few years before rotating to somebody else. In preparation for the competition to manage NCAR next year, the Board has drafted a strategic plan for UCAR ("UCAR2020"). The plan is written at a "very high level," which appears to be code language for "vague and unsubstantial." Although never explicitly stated, I believe that the intended audience is administrators and non scientists. The plan was sent this summer to presidents of all UCAR member institutions with a request for feedback. I was asked by representatives of President Emmert's office to provide comments on the document, which I did, although the UW did not appear on the list of 21 institutions that sent comments. Please send me email if you would like a copy of my comments. The board plans to use the strategic plan in preparing the UCAR proposal to manage NCAR, which will not be made public. Kelvin encouraged community members to provide feedback to the Board. When I asked how we were supposed to provide feedback on a proposal we were not permitted to view, he indicated that portions could be discretely distributed to interest parties. The National Science Board, which advises NSF, has issued a report calling for a National Hurricane Response Initiative (NHRI) to better understand and predict tropical storms. A highly integrated framework will address all aspects of tropical cyclones and their landfall impacts (atmosphere, ocean, civil engineering, ecosystem response, etc.) except for operational activities, public response, and public health. Although there are many priorities, the highest is predicting the intensity and size of landfalling storms. There will be a national hurricane research testbed with coupled models, and a goal to transfer advances to operational implementation. Of the proposed $300M in new annual funding, which is to come from a broad suite of federal agencies, $200M will be devoted to research activities, and $63M for the testbed. Three public workshops have been held to gather community feedback, and public comments may be made until 30 October on the NSB website (www.nsf.gov/nsb). A separate hurricane initiative, "HiFi" (Hurricane Intensity Forecasts and Impacts), is also being promoted to improve hurricane intensity forecasts, with an annual budget of $10M for 10 years. Unlike NHRI, proposed funding for HiFi will come from lease revenue for offshore oil platforms, with no congressional line items or earmarks on federal agencies. Cliff Jacobs from NSF indicated that an outside panel of high-level managers came to NCAR for a site review of NCAR management. The panel had a positive review of management, liked the NCAR strategic plan, and recommended the adoption of metrics for performance evaluation. They also noted the need for a petascale computing facility for community use, and suggested that NCAR management should have more control relative to UCAR. The competition to manage NCAR for the period 2009-2013 will start with an RFP later this month, followed by 'concept and design' papers Jan 2007. Full proposals will be invited for finalists around May 2007 with a due date in Aug 2007. A decision is expected by May 2008. All proposals must serve the scientific core of the NCAR strategic plan to promote undisrupted continuity of NCAR research and service act ivies. NCAR director Tim Killeen gave a report on NCAR's activities during the past year. The 2001 NCAR strategic plan was updated in 2006 from "NCAR as an Integrator" to "NCAR as an Integrator, Innovator and Community Builder." The new graduate visitor program was fully subscribed in the first year. This program provides funds for graduate students and their advisors to visit for 3-12 months. An undergraduate leadership workshop is planned for 19-23 June 2007. Five scientists were promoted to senior scientist this year. Computing facilities increased from 1 to 5 TFlops of sustained throughput, and NCAR connected to the 10 GBit terragrid network. A proposal was discussed for a "geocollaboratory" with a goal of distributed petaflop computing. HIAPER began service to the community this year in two field programs, and the NCAR driftsonde was successfully tested over Africa and the subtropical North Atlantic in August. Rick Anthes, President of UCAR, gave a talk on imperatives in the atmospheric sciences, motivated by dramatic examples of global change. He summarized evidence of glaciers retreating, sea level rise, 70 m thinning Greenland's ice in last 5 years, and clear warming of surface temps over the globe in past 5 years. He argued that we lack leadership to confront these challenges, and that academia should play an increasing role in this area. Joel Witter reviewed federal R&D budgets & policy issues. Federal budgets are stressed by well known challenges, particularly for non-defense discretionary items. Nevertheless, there is gathering momentum for the American Competitive Initiative, which proposes to double the budgets of "physical sciences" agencies over the next 10 years. The effected agencies include NSF, the science portion of DOE, and NIST; it does not include NOAA or NASA. NSF's budget reflects an 8% increase and, as usual, NOAA's budget has big cuts in the House and increases in the Senate that will be worked out in conference. NOAA's 'organic act' is not likely to clear the senate this year, although the feeling is that just getting to the floor of House was good publicity for NOAA. Legislation was introduced for the National Science Board hurricane initiative described above. The weather coalition has a new website (www.weathercoalition.org), and the UCAR office of government affairs has frequent budget updates on it's web page (www.ucar.edu/oga). Member representatives at the meeting this year participated in eight break-out groups, one for each topic in the UCAR strategic plan. We were charged with discussing the topics in the plan, and to make recommendations. I participated in the "science" session, where I argued that science should have greater representation in the plan, and there should be goals that are specific enough to be verified. During the plenary discussion of the results of the breakout groups, there were several suggestions that the plan is too vague in many aspects and lacks visionary goals. That's all for this year. You may find several of the presentations at http://www.ucar.edu/governance/meetings/oct06/members.html along with other information about the meeting. As always, I welcome your comments, and issues that you would like me to address in the future.