NOAA Forms Management

Oceanographer Robert Ballard (middle wearing tie) sung NOAA’s praises during his speech at the National Science Teachers Association conference in St. Louis this month. He’s pictured here along with NOAA staff from the St. Charles, Mo., weather forecast office, and all across the agency.

NOAA Corps’ Capt. Steve Barnum helped in the groundbreaking of the new LA-1 highway in Port Fourchon, La.

Team Member of the Month


Tim Mavor
NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service

NOAA’s Employee and Team Member of the Month for April are Mike Walker from the Office of the Under Secretary and Tim Mavor from NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.

Mike Walker is responsible for graphical oversight of all NOAA leadership Powerpoint presentations, helping to deliver NOAA's mission, vision, and operational priorities and successes to thousands of people around the world. In all cases, when NOAA leadership is conveying a message visually to the public or an external agency partner, Mike has had final clearance on the presentation. In addition, Mike produces all NOAA town hall and NOAA 101 presentations provided by the NOAA Under Secretary to NOAA employees throughout the country. Although located within the Office of the Under Secretary, leadership from nearly all of NOAA's line and staff offices have at some point relied on Mike's talents and skills to convey their message visually. Mike has led all graphical support efforts at every NOAA Senior Executive Service Summit, providing rapid fire support. Mike's talents and skills raise the bar of effectiveness in these high level NOAA meetings.

A physical scientist, Tim Mavor has made significant contributions to NOAA's mission through his work in successfully developing and implementing the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) sea surface temperature daily frontal product. This product, which covers the entire GOES domain, was distributed by NOAA experimentally in October 2005 and became fully operational in December. Of particular interest for the coastal regions of California, Oregon, and Washington is the Oceanic Front Probability Index. This important component of the frontal product is now widely utilized by a range of users from scientists to fishers, and describes the probability density of sea surface temperature front formation occurring off the West Coast. The spatial and temporal variability of oceanic fronts are an important part of the West Coast current system and are vital to understanding and managing fisheries within this system.

Team Member of the Month


Lawrence Miller
NOAA's National Weather Service

NOAA’s Employee and Team Member of the Month for March are Shirley Murillo from NOAA Research and Lawrence Miller from NOAA’s National Weather Service.

A research meteorologist for NOAA's Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Shirley Murillo conducts research on the boundary layer wind structure of landfalling tropical cyclones. As a part of this research, she performs real-time surface wind analyses that provide wind field products for use by the National Hurricane Center, FEMA, and emergency managers. This work has earned awards from NOAA's High Performance Computing and Communications Center for her and her team. She also works on a Doppler radar wind retrieval scheme that deduces the primary circulation for landfalling hurricanes. This technique helps to better understand the inner core wind structure of tropical cyclone as they approach land. Shirley has participated in numerous research flights into tropical cyclones aboard NOAA's WP-3D aircraft over the Atlantic Basin and Gulf of Mexico. On these flights she has operated and monitored various instruments onboard the aircraft, including the Doppler radar.

When the captain of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy reported to the NWS Alaska region that his ship's antenna was malfunctioning, and he was no longer receiving real-time NOAA Polar Operational Environmental Satellite imagery to help guide his ship through the treacherous Bering Sea ice, Lawrence Miller, a systems administrator with the region immediately wrote a computer script that automatically captured any visible and infrared polar passes over the Bering Sea, converted the data to a format the Coast Guard equipment could utilize, and pushed it through the Internet to the ship. His dedicated efforts quickly restored the ship's ability to navigate through the Bering Sea's ice, and its crew's ability to conduct the research on the effects of climate change on Bering sea mammals. His unique and innovative approach, his flexibility, and his selfless dedication reflected favorably upon him and all of NOAA.

The NOAA ship Oscar Dyson wasn’t stuck in ice, but was surrounded by some of the thickest ice ever seen locally while refueling in Women’s Bay, off Kodiak Island, Alaska.