GREGORY D. McCURDY

Assistant Research Climate Applications Programmer
Atmospheric Sciences Division
Western Regional Climate Center

EDUCATION:

M.S., Soil Science/Biometeorology, Utah State University B.S., Physics, Brigham Young University A.D., Arts and Sciences, Ricks College, Idaho

PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS:

Mr. McCurdy's interest is in the ongoing installation, assembly, programming, operation and maintenance of a variety of data systems, in environments such as UNIX, DOS, WINDOWS, using Basic, Pascal, Fortran, Assembly, C, PERL, C-Shell, and Python. His interests include weather and climate information sources such as RAWS, NWS, SNOTEL, AGRIMET, NVDOE, McIDAS, and ALERT. He is experienced with DROT (DOMSAT Receive Only Terminal), which receives weather platform messages transmitted via GOES satellite and other data telemetry methods. His climate center efforts include converting the distribution of data to internet transmission, including system configuration and installation of LDM-IDD software to receive climate information. He constructed the climate center's WWW home page, and converted the new RAWS data ingestor to the ASCADS data system to provide data transmission error correction and retrieval of all RAWS climate data. Mr. McCurdy is also responsible for the collection and analysis of Sierra Nevada weather station data, the changeover of Difax data from satellite feed to internet feeds, and then establishing processes to print the desired forecast maps and to provide network access to satellite imagery. Mr. McCurdy is also working on a climate center inventory of data repositories. He assisted in the development of a climate center metadata database and an integrated climate monitoring system.

Mr. McCurdy's background includes deployment and installation of weather observing and research instrumentation. Past projects have included design and development of atmospheric radiation and energy balance monitoring platforms. His expertise includes operation and maintenance of long-term Bowen-ratio ET (evapotranspiration) stations and meteorological/climatological monitoring networks. His experience includes use of Campbell Scientific dataloggers with temperature sensors (thermistor and thermocouple), humidity sensors, wind sensors, pressure sensors (atmospheric and hydrologic), precipitation measuring devices (tipping, weighing and pressure displacement), soil moisture sensors (blocks and TDR), linearity sensors for flow or displacement, O2 and CO2 sensors, a variety of atmospheric radiation sensors (longwave and shortwave, silicon or thermopile based), and gamma radiation sensors (pressurized ion chambers). Applications have been primarily agricultural or environmental, but have also included test chambers and space applications.