Congratulations go to Devin Thomas, Nancy Casey, Bryan Iddings, and Scott Embler for the recognition they have received as a NESDIS Outstanding Information Technology and Engineering Employee(s) of the Year! Each were nominated for their work in designing the software system for quality control, developing an improved approach to standardizing soil moisture values, and establishing a new soil moisture dataset for the U.S. Climate Reference Network in alignment with requirements of the U.S. National Soil Moisture Network.
Devin Thomas, Nancy Casey, Bryan Iddings
Congratulations go to Nicol Newell-Bell, Paul Tisch, Russell Scarpino, and William Franklin for receiving an NCEI Collaboration Award on the NCEI-CO Stewardship Operations and Maintenance Project! This collaboration award is to recognize the joint ITSD-CCOG effort to address NCEI’s CO stewardship operations and maintenance challenges. This group began an effort a year ago to address data archive and delivery issues with the NCEI-CO infrastructure, and since then they have made real and measurable improvements as evidenced by turning items in the NCEI Operations Report ‘green’. To achieve these results, NCEI staff worked collaboratively and strengthened the working relationship between ITSD and CCOG. Everyone exhibited a commitment to the NCEI mission and a OneNCEI approach that has resulted in success.
Nicol Newell-Bell, Russell Scarpino
Congratulations go to Rocky Bilotta, Scott Embler, Eric Freeman, Ethan Shepherd, Pete Jones, Bryant Korzeniewski, Georgi Kostov, Chunying Liu, Shelley McNeill, Xungang Yin, Michael Parker & Fengying Sun for receiving an NCEI Collaboration Award on the NCEI-NC Parallels Migration! NCEI has been running a significant portion of its IT server hosting platform on an old virtualization technology called Parallels Virtuozzo, commonly called “Parallels”. The platform stopped receiving security and maintenance upgrades from the provider several years ago, and NCEI adopted at the time a replacement platform called Ovirt. In an effort that has spanned the past four years, NCEI personnel from all divisions and centers have worked together towards the migration of the platform from Parallels to Ovirt.
This migration, performed while also maintaining the existing platform with minimal downtime to our user community, required the expertise, planning, teamwork, coordination, and efforts of many within NCEI. The collaborative approach taken by these individuals is noteworthy.
Top Row (L-R): Xungang Yin, Pete Jones, Ethan Shepherd, Eric Freeman, Rocky Bilotta Bottom Row (L-R): Georgi Kostov, Bryan Korzeniewski, Michael Parker, Chunying Liu
Congratulations to Lois Ellingson for completing this year’s update to NOAA’s Research and Development Database (NRDD)! The NOAA Research and Development Database (NRDD) supports NOAA’s planning and progress tracking efforts and helps capture trends and evaluate the quality and performance of NOAA’s Research and Development activities. Deputy NOAA Administrator, Tim Gallaudet, highlighted the NRDD in NOAA’s annual report and in a dedicated video.
Lois Ellingson
Lois worked closely with the NCEI NRDD Federal Lead to ensure that data provided by NCEI POCs were accurate, complete, and logically consistent. She helped navigate a new NRDD interface for which bugs had to be identified and resolved. She liaised with the NRDD Administration Team to ensure everyone’s NRDD account was set up correctly, proactively providing feedback to NRDD Administration in order to improve the NRDD experience in future data calls. Finally, she manually entered 56 projects into the NRDD containing hundreds of cells of data for each project, coordinating directly with three NCEI Division/Centers to get submitted projects approved.
