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Riverside Recognizes Multiple NCEI SDS Team Members at NESDIS/NCEI 2021 Awards Ceremony!

December 10, 2021

MSN Migration was a huge effort over the past few years, and this year, the MSN project team completed migration of legacy systems at NCEI’s main sites.  

SDS staff who made significant contributions to this effort included:  Mike Chapman, Lenny Collazo, Angela Sallis, Vidhya Gondle, Denise Gordon, Tiffany Toft, Andy Navard, John Voorhees, and Brian Newport.

The U.S. Drought Portal (drought.gov) saw significant upgrades this past year.  The streamlined site allows users to access more information, and allowing retrieval on a sector, county and local basis.  The work marks a key milestone for NCEI and NESDIS, and received high praise by stakeholders across NOAA and beyond. 

SDS personnel who played a key role here included Rocky Bilotta, Lauren Cater, John Frimmel, and Dustin Shackley.

Our SDS team also provided support for NCEI’s Bronze Medal Award-winning Team efforts.  Ken Roberts, Pichai Polprasert, Vidhya Gondle, Michael Allen, Phil Jones, and Heather Brown, supported implementation of an enterprise system to efficiently ingest environmental data into the NOAA Archive for National use

Rocky Bilotta, recently received  a 2021 NESDIS Collaboration Award for his role in the research, development, and integration of the Climate Prediction Center Morphing Technique (CMORPH) Climate Data Record precipitation data set into the global Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and making it operationally available to stakeholders and decision makers through drought.gov.

Bryant Korzeniewski was commended by John Ogren, NWS Chief Learning Officer, for his support to the Cooperative Observer (COOP) team.  Bryant initiated a unique user-focused approach that converted field user requirements into virtual efforts. He and the supporting team surveyed COOP community needs and took actions that resulted in time-critical updates to many of the existing virtual modules to reflect current information, while loading new learning plans into the CLC.

Andy Navard  and his team were recognized by the Northern Gulf Institute for providing just-in-time support to a Red Tide Bloom event in the north center Gulf Coast.  When NGI received data from ADPH showing bloom populations in Alabama state waters for the first time this season from 10-17 Oct,  Andy and his team provided a quick turnaround  to get these important data ingested and displayed on the map viewer for access by the public.   

Candace Hutchins, Gary Ellingson and Lois Ellingson received recognition as the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) Outstanding Support and Policy Employee awardee for 2021. They were nominated for contributions in developing, implementing, and sustaining pioneering tools and policies for project, program, and portfolio management of more than 200 active products and 50 projects.