Outstanding NCEI Staff Earn Recognition

From contributions to our knowledge of tropical cyclones to efforts at improving organizational diversity, several members of NCEI’s staff earned end-of-year recognition for their outstanding contributions to the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS).

NESDIS gives year-end awards for a wide range of activities to those who demonstrate  exemplary effort. For the 2017 NESDIS Awards Program, NCEI honorees include a team of scientists who have contributed significantly to the study of sea surface temperatures and to many others who participated in archiving, management, technology, inclusivity, and scientific endeavors.

We’re proud to showcase the members of our talented staff who earned this honor (listed by category).

Outstanding Information Technology and Engineering Employees of the Year

For consistent collaboration and hard work in development of an enterprise system to ingest environmental data to the NCEI Archive, NESDIS honors:

• Michael Allen
• Jeff Bliss
• Ryan Cox
• Heather Brown
• Jon Burroughs
• Linda Copley
• John Fauerbach
• David Neufeld
• Pichai Polprasert
• Kenneth Roberts
• Kenneth Schmidt
• Richard Smith
• Jason Symonds
• Lou Vasquez

For outstanding ingenuity and collaboration in development of a detailed implementation plan, including cost, schedule, performance, and risk for the NOAA Mission Science Network (MSN), NESDIS honors:

• Robert Fryer
• Scott Hausman
• John LaRocque
• Jay Morris
• Mark Noto

For exceptional computer architecture management and systems development and administration of the MSN, NESDIS honors:

• John LaRocque

Outstanding Support and Policy Employees of the Year

For continuous production of automated solutions for emerging needs including the development of the automated “actions” tracking system that keeps management up to date daily on open external and internal actions via workflows, NESDIS honors:

• Clark Lind

Outstanding Science and Data Management Employees of the Year

For creating and implementing a new method for forward-looking sea surface temperature (SST) bias correction that also connects to historical observations for climate record consistency, and for improving the El Niño/La Niña SST magnitude and structure reconstruction, NESDIS honors:

• Boyin Huang
• Viva Banzon
• Tim Boyer
• Jay Lawrimore
• Matthew Menne
• Thomas Smith
• Russell Vose
• Huai-Min Zhang

For extensive contributions to our knowledge of tropical cyclones and their physical impacts on the United States, NESDIS honors:

• James Kossin

For the design and the implementation of a process-level improvement program to reengineer an NCEI data acquisition and quality control system that makes possible accurate and on-time monthly monitoring and assessment of global land surface air temperature anomalies and trends, NESDIS honors:

• Diana Kantor
• Matthew Menne
• Claude Williams

Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity Award

For outstanding efforts in improving the inclusivity of NCEI and cultivating a more diverse workforce in NOAA and the sciences, NESDIS honors:

• Jessica Blunden