To: Atmospheric Sciences faculty, students, and staff. From: Greg Hakim. Subject: 2007 UCAR Members Meeting. On 9--10 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 meeting began with a series of reports, the first of which was from the UCAR treasurer. Of NCAR's 2007 total annual budget of $287M, $161M comes from NSF, $92M from non-NSF government funds, and $34M from other sources. Excluding funding for the HIAPER aircraft, the total budget is roughly unchanged from 2006 or down about 3% accounting for inflation. NSF's contribution to the overall budget increased from 49% in 2006 to 53% in 2007. Cliff Jacobs from NSF gave a review of funding award rates at NSF from the top down. For all of NSF the current award rate of 21% is down from 30% ten years ago. This drop in award rate occurs in an environment where the NSF budget is up 44% (2000-2005; about 5.5% compound annual rate), which is nearly balanced by an increase in the average award size of 41%. The main reason for the decline in award rate is that submissions are up 50%. For ATM, the award rate is 38%, with an average annual budget of 128K. An external survey found that a driving force for proposal submissions is maintaining laboratory support. Two other interesting results of the survey are that the "perceived" award rate is much lower than the actual rate, and 35% of proposal submitters felt that they proposed transformative research, compared with 3% for proposal reviewers. UCAR President Rick Anthes discussed the new UCAR strategic plan, which was used to prepare the UCAR proposal to NSF to manage NCAR. You may recall that this is the first time the contract will be openly competed. The UCAR proposal was submitted on 31 August, and aside from that, there was no discussion of this issue. Anthes joined a small group to visit Cuba this year to discuss possibilities for collaboration. Apparently Fidel Castro is very hands on when it comes to hurricane forecasting, often visiting the forecast center and suggesting revisions to the forecast. NCAR director Tim Killeen gave a report on NCAR's activities during the past year. NCAR has a new web site, and Killeen solicited content from universities for inclusion on the page. NCAR is ranked #1 in geosciences citations (average of 19.58 per paper), closely followed by the University of Washington; NOAA, NASA, and U. Colorado round out top 5. Computing at NCAR will increase from 20 to 60 TFlops by mid 2008. The next upgrade (ca. 2011) will not be housed at NCAR, and a proposal has been submitted to NSF to house the facility at the University of Wyoming. NSF has convened an external panel of experts to evaluate the merit of the proposal, which one person confidentially told me is not a good sign. CISL Director Al Kelly suggested that failure to fund the facility would be a "disaster" for the geosciences community. It seems to me the real problem is that NCAR hasn't formulated a backup plan, but pinned their hopes on a single plan, which essentially creates a new supercomputing facility. Killeen mention the availability of a new web portal that allows access to all IPCC runs in GIS format, allowing data to be rendered with standard GIS plotting software. Finally, he mentioned the undergraduate leadership workshop, which in 2007 hosted 20 students. UCAR Office of Programs Director Jack Fellows discussed a number of new educational resources that have been added to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and COMET. The COSMIC program, which uses GPS satellite occultations to infer vertical atmospheric structure, is currently yielding about 1200 soundings per day. These soundings are now assimilated at NCEP, ECMWF, and Meto-France in real time. Work is proceeding toward delivering the data via Unidata's LDM. Next up was Prof. Kerry Cook, Chair of the University Relations committee (URC), which is charged with facilitating communications between UCAR and it's members. Among other things, the committee reviews NCAR non-core proposals to insure that NCAR is not competing unfairly. The biggest controversy of the meeting occurred when Cook presented a motion to rename the committee to The President's Advisory Committee on University Relations (TPACUR), which requires a 2/3 majority vote. Usually voting at these meetings is a sleepy affair with unanimous outcomes; I can't recall hearing a 'nay' vote in three years. After calling for a voice vote, UCAR Board Chair Kelvin Droegemeier claimed to have "heard" a 2/3 majority, which was in fact far from clear from where I was sitting (I voted no). He was called out to do a hand vote, which resulted in a narrow margin for the motion, but those who didn't vote were not counted. That's high drama for this meeting. Joel Widder reviewed federal R&D budgets & policy issues, which featured good news for a change this year. The Whitehouse NSF 2008 budget proposal features an 8% increase, with the House and Senate budgets adding a little to that. As has been the case for many years now, the Geosciences division does not keep up, with a proposed increase of only 5%. There was even better news for NOAA, which usually has it's budget savaged on first proposal, only to get rescued late in negotiations. This year the Whitehouse proposed level funding, and the House and Senate proposed increases of 5% and 10%, respectively. NASA's budget features increases to Earth science programs and satellite programs, which had been cut in previous years. Apparently the recent NRC Earth Science Decadal Survey was widely read and influential on Capitol Hill. The fact that the environment has figured prominently in Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign was also felt to be influential and far reaching, in that it is forcing other candidates to stake out positions on the issue. Elections were held for a number of committees, the most important of which was for the Board of Trustees. Our own Prof. Dennis Hartmann was elected a Trustee, along with 3 others on a slate of 6. I believe that Conway Leovy was the last UW professor to serve as Trustee. Yours truly was elected to the URC, or TPACUR as it's now known. Here are links to resources of potential interest: www.ucar.edu/governance/meetings/oct07/members.html (Annual reports) www.comet.ucar.edu/ (COMET educational materials) portal.leadproject.org (LEAD educational materials) www.ucar.edu/oga (Office of Government Affairs) www.fin.ucar.edu/antheswebshare/ (Anthes powerpoint slides) www.ucar.edu/webcasts/#congressional (Congressional briefings) That's all for this year. As always, I welcome your comments, and issues that you would like me to address in the future.