To: Atmospheric Sciences faculty, students, and staff. From: Greg Hakim. Subject: 2009 UCAR Members Meeting. On 12-13 October I attended the UCAR Annual Members Meeting as a representative of the University of Washington. In accordance with my responsibilities as a Members Representative, I am sending this 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 of you 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 2009 (2008) total annual budget of $346M ($300M), $187M ($159M) comes from NSF. Although the total budget is up about 15% in the past year, a lot of the increase came from ARRA (stimulus) funding. NSF's contribution to the overall budget is about 53%, compared to 51% in 2008. Sarah Ruth from NSF gave the Atmospheric Sciences update (Steve Nelson was unavailable). First off, the ATM section no longer exists at NSF, but has been merged and renamed "Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences" (AGS) (I'm not sure of the location of "geospace," but I think it's near Earth). There have been many personnel changes in the past year, including: Jarvis Moyers (division director) retired, Steve Nelson is now acting division director, Jay Fein retired, Alex Pszenny is a new program manager for Atmospheric Chemistry, Brad Smull is now program manager for mesoscale meteorology, and Eric DeWeaver is a new program manager for climate and large scale dynamics. ARRA (stimulus) funds amount to $601M to the Geosciences Directorate, or 20% of all ARRA funds given to NSF; of that $73.4M went to AGS, and of that $13M went to NCAR as a supplement to base funds. Priorities for ARRA funds were: supporting early career scientists, raising proposal success rates, boosting climate research, and infrastructure. A ranked list of the sections within GEO in terms of funds are: Oceanography (OCE), AGS, Earth Sciences (EAR), and Integrated Computing Education and Research (ICER). New division-wide funds totaling $46M are aimed at climate research activity related to modeling, scaling complexity, water, environmental observation, and adaptation. NSF/GEO will release a new strategic plan call GeoVision on 15 October, which represents a sequal to the previous report, GEO2000. The plan will outline future research directions for GEO. UCAR President Rick Anthes began his annual report by discussing an open access policy at UCAR that will make all UCAR publications freely available immediately after acceptance for publication. This repository, OpenSky, will launch in June 2010, and is made possible by copyright arrangements between UCAR and the AMS, AGU, and Springer. Author prepared versions of the papers will be available for download, not the journal typeset versions. It smells a lot like the "arXiv" facility that the physics community has used for years. UCAR conducted a community survey earlier this year. The results reflect a fairly balanced distribution of support for UCAR's programs and assets; the full results are available from www.ucar.edu/survey/2009_comm. UCAR purchased 3375 Mitchell Lane in June 2009 funded by selling short-term bonds. This property is located near the other Foothills Lab properties, and will be used as "swing space" in FY10/11 for other parts of NCAR that are under construction. Over the long-term, the Research Applications Lab (RAL) may occupy the space. UCAR also engaged in a "workforce management" planning exercise during the past year, which will result in a codified scheme for employees, although little actual change in practice is expected. UCAR and NCAR will be turning 50 next year, and there are plans for a party featuring free food and booze at the AMS Annual Meeting. Next up was NCAR Director Eric Barron. He talked about increased funding for the NCAR visitor program. $1.5M are available in the next fiscal year, with a very large increment to RAL to boost community involvement in applied projects. The ASP postdoc program expanded by three positions in the past year, with 10 supported on base funding, and 5 cosponsored with external funds. A new partnership with CDC brings new postdocs in climate change and public health, which CDC is fully funding. The Earth and Space Systems Lab (ESSL) is undergoing a reorganization. Former director Guy Brasseur has been replaced by interim director Greg Holland. HAO has been separated from ESSL and reports directly to the NCAR Director. MMM, CGD, and ACD will remain divisions but have formed a stronger alliance; Rich Rotunno is the new MMM director. After 6 years of background work, a proposal has been submitted to NSF for a new supercomputing facility to be located in Wyoming, which is kicking in $40M, land, and the electrical infrastructure for the project. It seems that being able to drive to the facility from Boulder to look at the computers was an important factor that ruled out the Columbia Gorge from consideration (cf. Google and Amazon). The facility will have 153K gross square feet, and may be LEED gold or platinum certified. If approved by NSF, ground breaking is expected in March 2010. A climate modeling strategy for the future was outlined, involving a long-term $200M investment in next generation, high resolution models that have biochemistry and the ability to nest regionally to high resolution. UCAR Office of Programs (UOP) Director Jack Fellows' report began with the renaming of UOP to UCP: UCAR Community Programs. COMET is celebrating it's 20th anniversary, and there are many new modules. He also described an interesting project to extend the life of GOES satellites scheduled to be decommissioned. As I understand it, UCP partnered with countries in Latin America to cheaply serve the data, and NOAA agreed to keep the satellite in operation while turning over ground operations to UCP. Thus the project extends the useful lifetime of these satellites while providing real-time data access to the Americas. The GPS occultation project COSMIC-I currently has 6 satellites that recover approximately 1500-2000 soundings per day. Plans are underway for COSMIC-II, which will have 12 satellites that recover approximately 10000 soundings per day. Another proposal would install GPS precipitable water sensors on Gulf of Mexico oil rigs. Finally, Jack discussed PACE postdocs, whom apply climate expertise in the policy realm. On the DC policy and funding outlook, there was a refreshing change to good news after years of gloom and bad news. Cindy Schmidt from the UCAR Office of Gov Affairs reminded us that their web site, www.ucar.edu/oga, is full of information on budgets, advocacy activities, and climate legislation. UCAR advocacy goals for 2009 included promoting the UCAR community as a resource to the new administration, contributing to the climate change debate, and positioning the community to participate in climate services/adaptation planning. In terms of appropriations, for FY10 all agencies associated with weather/climate research get solid bumps up from the president, House, and Senate budgets. In terms of the climate change policy debate, it was noted that health care reform dominates everything else right now. The Waxman-Markey bill (H.R. 2454) passed in June and awaits action in the Senate on the Kerry-Boxer bill. W-M is mainly cap and trade, but also has some adaptation, and cap-trade revenue would feed basic energy research. Emerging adaption opportunities related to proposed legislation include public health, state programs to build "resilience," natural resources (protection and restoration), international interactions (helping vulnerable countries develop adaptation plans), and climate services (national agency; provide info to users and decision makers). The take-home messages are that there will be new opportunities with the enactment of climate legislation and that adaptation is the future, so the community needs to position itself to prepare for this. It was suggested that partnerships with non-traditional agencies (NIH, USDA, DOD, public health) will be important for the opportunities that are expected to emerge. This year's Members Forum was a continuation of last year's theme on community resilience and the involvement of our community with local and regional plans for adaptation to climate change. Shere Abbott from the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President gave the keynote address, which was followed by talks by government representatives from New York and Chicago on their adaptation and mitigation plans. The latter two talks were excellent and revealed that these two cities have very advanced plans and widespread engagement of scientists, government agencies, and local stakeholders. Although I had the impression that Seattle was a leader in this area, these talks left me feeling that leadership lies further East. Abbott gave the impression that the science of climate change is well known and accepted, although during Q&A she suggested that model improvement should still be a priority. She indicated that we need new science (on adaptation and mitigation), new institutions that are adaptive and flexible (I read that as something other than Universities in their current form), and new knowledge. In addition to comprehensive energy and climate legislation, Abbott proposed that a national adaptation framework is needed as is improved climate change resilience to avoid "cascading failures." Adam Freed represented New York and discussed their plan to build climate resilience (PLANYC). He emphasized the plan is grounded in science and risk management. Key issues that became apparent are: information overload (lots of projections), a disconnect between research and practitioners, and overlapping jurisdictions (rules, permitting, and who pays). Their process involved the following steps: (1) using projections to identify vulnerabilities, (2) creating a risk matrix, (3) identifying adaptation strategies, and (4) creating a prioritization matrix. He indicated that uncertainty is OK, and in fact that projections are not needed to identify vulnerabilities; there are many benefits to going through this process regardless of what change ultimately takes place. Joyce Coffee presented Chicago's Change Action plan, which launched 2008 and is also grounded in research. She emphasized, as did Freed, the "collatoral benefits" of planning for climate change, regardless of what transpires. Furthermore, identifying things that are already being done well for adaptation is useful for promoting these activities. One final note is that the University of Washington UCAR membership is up for renewal in 2010. You may find several of the presentations at http://www.ucar.edu/governance/meetings/oct09/ along with other information about the meeting; other presentations will appear in a few days on a follow-up web page that will be linked from this page. As always, I welcome your comments, and issues that you would like me to address in the future.