Brian Etherton
July 29, 2011

HMT Welcomes Brian Etherton

HMT would like to welcome team member, Brian Etherton, a meteorologist hired in February 2011 into the Forecast Application Branch of the Earth System Research Laboratory's Global System Division. Brian first became involved in HMT as workshops for the HMT-Southeast project were conducted in North Carolina (where he was prior to NOAA, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Brian has, for a number of years, been involved with the use of convection permitting (horizontal resolution 3-4km) numerical weather prediction ensembles for the prediction of precipitation. He developed such an ensemble for the mid-Atlantic states while at UNC, with 16 forecasts produced at UNC, and 12 more produced at local national weather service offices, the Savannah River National Laboratory, and other universities in North Carolina. The ability of these models to predict precipitation forced by small scale features, such as the sea-breeze, mountains, and mesoscale convergence zones, allowed for improved prediction of warm season precipitation in the southeast United States.

Brian earned his first degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. After working at Lockheed-Martin Missiles and Space, in Sunnyvale, CA, as a software engineer for the TIROS/POES satellite program, he went to Penn State University, and got his Ph.D. in meteorology. That was followed by a post-doc at the University of Miami, a faculty position at the university of North Carolina, and then the position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brian's career has always focused on the use of ensembles for forecasting and for model initialization, and has moved from simple global models to convection-permitting WRF ensembles. In addition to numerical weather prediction research and weather forecasting, he has been very active in education, playing a central role in the establishment of the Bachelor of Science in Meteorology degree at UNC Charlotte and being a strong contributor to the Unidata User's Committee. As a member of the users committee, Brian was one of the chairs of the 2009 Triennial Workshop titled "Using operational and experimental observations in geoscience education", attended by over 80 participants from more than 30 academic institutions, four foreign institutions and three U.S. Government laboratories.

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