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.