On 6 August 2012, GS&T branch scientist Dr. John McCormack was awarded a 2011 Editors' Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for AGU's flagship journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). This award recognizes Dr. McCormack's contributions in maintaining the highest standard of scientific quality in GRL publications through the peer-review process.
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A new data assimilation capability in NOGAPS-ALPHA (using NAVDAS), recently developed by scientists in Codes 7640, 7220 and 7530, has been used to generate the first global atmospheric analysis fields that extend from the ground to the edge of space (≈100 km altitude). This was achieved by assimilating high-altitude temperature and water vapor measurements from NASA satellites. Mesospheric saturation ratios at around 83 km computed from these NOGAPS-ALPHA fields have self-consistently reproduced the 3 mid-latitude mesospheric clouds (MCs) observed by SHIMMER over the northwestern United States on 13 June 2007 (see opposite). Results of this work were recently published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, worked which received a 2009 ARPAD award from NRL.