10:00AM Mountain Daylight Time
Members present: Olga Wihelmi, Eric Apel, Allison Baker, Peter Sullivan, Lulin Xue, Peter Lawrence, Carol Ruchti, Brad Klotz, Holger Vomel, Mariana Cains, Ryan Sobash, Ben Johnson
Also present: Glen Romine from the Directorate’s Office
Discussion with Glen Romine
Upcoming events
Day of Discovery is coming up on October 1st. The UCAR Members meeting is October 8th-9th with the Board of Trustees meeting on October 10th.
Program Operating Plan
The Program Operating Plan is in. The cycle is that we submit a report by the end of August about what we’d like to accomplish in the upcoming year. Then in September we write up what was accomplished in the previous year.
Strategic plan
The Strategic Plan is trucking along. We’re hoping to have a written draft by the end of the month, but it looks like the delivery will be pushed back. It’s hard to finalize the draft when it’s a soft deadline. The new anticipated deadline is mid-October. The past strategic plan had ambiguous priorities. The upcoming one will be a lot clearer about what the priorities are. The deadline for submission to NSF is in March. Next summer is when we work on the Implementation Plan that talks about how we’ll execute the strategic plan. After that, the next NSF Site Visit to NSF NCAR is in 2026, so we begin planning for it in 2025.
Visits
Michael Morgan was just visiting. Admiral Hahn and Anne Johansen (Division Director of the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences) will be visiting in mid-November.
Question and Answer with Glen
Question: The site visit you mentioned is the NSF Site Visit?
Yes. Part of the cooperative agreement is that the site visit occurs at the mid-point. NSF will bring folks out and NSF NCAR prepares all of the content. There are four separate visits: three visits are science related (Modeling/Data Assimilation, Observations, and Computational Science) and the last visit is Management. The three science visits are in the late spring and the management visit is in the summer.
Question: Is the Day of Discovery agenda set?
The Day of Discovery is focused on coordination and collaboration between NSF NCAR and UCP. That’s what the focus of the Board of Trustees retreat was this summer. The opening session will be about Earth System Predictability. It will be followed by a split session with one focusing on the Remote Sensing Initiative and the other focusing on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Next will be a session on educational activities. Then the lightning and poster sessions and then a session on workforce development run by Liz Paige and Rebecca Hacker. There will be nine lightning talks and we have confirmations for eight of them.
Question: Any updates on the hiring to fill Scott McIntosh’s position?
We haven’t started on that one yet. We’re currently hiring an assistant director of operations, which was a process started before Scott’s departure. It’s hard to do multiple hires within the directorate at the same time. We’ll be starting the hiring process for Scott’s replacement in mid-winter and had to get a contract in place with a firm to run the search. Those things take a while.
Glen’s request to the NSA-EC
We’ve have loose discussions of trying to elevate our activities. We’d like to get you involved with visiting the NSF NCAR EC. What are some possible dates?
Lab social events
General discussion about how to proceed with a funding request for lab social events. Should we contact the lab admins to tell us how many people are remote? Remote workers can access funds to be on-site for events but it’s a UCAR-level decision about how to allocate those funds — it’s beyond NSF NCAR’s discretion. Perhaps we should contact admins for approximate numbers of past participation in on-site events. Or we could set a fixed percentage per lab (50-70%)?
A good time for these events would be avoiding the summer months and the winter holidays. Perhaps early November for the social events and mid-February for the Town Hall?
Video introduction
NSF NCAR has a rich history of scientific achievement and discovery, yet when new employees attend orientation, this history isn’t discussed. Especially in the era of remote work, many employees might not developed a sense of shared history and purpose with the organization. The Employee Resource Groups all have prepared video introductions for new employees. Should we try to assemble a similar video introduction to the NSA that dovetails with a documentary-style introduction to NSF NCAR history?
Action Items
- Follow up with Glen and Everette with letter requesting meetings between the NSA-EC and the NCAR EC and funding for lab social events.
- Explore options for NSA video introduction.