To: Atmospheric Sciences faculty, students, and staff From: Greg Hakim Subject: 2012 UCAR Members Meeting On 16-17 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 was run by the chair of the Board of Trustees, our own Dennis Hartmann, and began with a series of reports, the first of which was from UCAR President Tom Bogdan. NSF reviewed UCAR management last November and the outcome was very successful: NSF solicited a proposal for renewal of of the UCAR management contract, rather than a re-competition; a re-competition for the management of NCAR is anticipated when the new contract expires in 2018. President Bogdan's focal points consist of: university partnerships, increased federal funding, cost management, stakeholder engagement (building relationships), and expanding partnerships. In terms of new means of communication, there's a President's blog, and an option for anonymous email. The largest financial stress of the year concerned NCAR's budget, which was cut 6.4% (NSF was up 4.8%). The new $70M Wyoming supercomputing facility is online, with 1.5 Petaflops of compute capacity. Noting that the weather industry comprises $10-40B of activity, Bogdan recently proposed a new Weather Commission to engage with Congress directly on issues related to the community. Reservations on the commission were expressed by some members because "climate" is not an overt part of the mission. Dan Wilson gave the Treasure's report, which revealed that NCAR's total budget decreased from $430M in 2011 to $391M in 2012. A part of the decrease is due to the fact that funding to develop the Wyoming computing facility was greater in 2011. Non-NSF government funding to NCAR decreased from $120M in 2011 to $112M in 2012, and non-government funding decreased from $61M in 2011 to $53M in 2012. Total NSF funding (core + non-core) comprises 55% of NCAR's total budget; this compares to 47% in 2011 and 56% in (2010). The Public Policy Briefing reviewed the federal budget situation, which centered on the 10-year spending limits enacted by Congress in August 2011. A continuing resolution extends the federal budget through March 2013 with a 0.5% increase, but the automatic spending cuts of $110B are scheduled to kick in on 2 January. These cuts involve "sequestration" of funds, and exactly how they will be implemented by OMB is unclear. Estimates of the size of the cuts include 9.4% for the defense budget and 8.2% for nonsecurity discretionary items. However, since portions of the budget are exempt from cuts (e.g. active military pay, which is 2/3 of defense department budget), the impact on discretionary parts of the budget could easily be much larger. Another major funding item effecting the community concerns NOAA, which may have its satellite program transferred to NASA. The Weather Commission was discussed again, and it was noted that there will be a "weather day" on the hill next Spring. The topic of the Members' Forum this year was the NCAR Strategic Plan, which was introduced by NCAR Director Roger Wakimoto. In order to solicit input from the community before the NCAR Strategic Planning Council starts writing the plan, the Member Representatives participated in breakout sessions devoted to the following topics (my summary of the names): Data Management; Predictive Science; Trans-disciplinary science ("human dimensions"); Future Directions in Community Modeling; Observational and Experimental Research; and Early-career Science Forum; and Integrating Research, Education, Diversity and Engagement. During reports from the breakout sessions, a number of common themes emerged, including quantifying and communicating uncertainty, and data assimilation. That's all for this year. You may find several of the meeting presentations at http://www.ucar.edu/governance/meetings/oct12/ along with additional information about the meeting; other presentations and summary information 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.