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JOSHUA WURMAN

[Image: Black and white photograph of Joshua Wurman standing in a field looking into the distance, with a large truck labeled "DOW3 DOPPLER ON WHEELS" and "ROTATE Center for Severe Weather Research" in the background.]

I grew up in Pennsylvania, bereft of any really meaningful opportunities to experience severe weather, hurricanes, even real deep snow. As a youth, I tried to impress friends and girls with my home weather station and insect collection. These efforts, among other factors, kept me well out of the running for homecoming king. Naturally, I moved on to a party school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to search for a better social life. But hating schoolwork, I rushed through it, earning my MS at only 21. Then after some aimless additional years in school I dropped out for three years, working for the Air Force on nuclear winter computer simulations and other cheery subjects. Returning to MIT, I earned my Doctorate and moved to Colorado to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on bistatic radar networks, a new type of weather radar system that I had invented. However, after seeing real High Plains thunderstorms close up, and tornadoes, I got distracted and conceived of building a network of big, fast scanning radars that could drive right up to tornadoes and fires, inside hurricanes, and into other nice weather. The DOW program was born, and I moved down to Oklahoma to be a professor for a few years, chase tornadoes and hurricanes, file patents, teach and write papers. In the middle of this, I traveled to Asia on a research project and met my wife operating a weather radar on an island off the coast of Hong Kong and conned her into believing that Oklahoma was just like Hong Kong. After receiving tenure and the implied lifetime sentence at the university, I did the sensible thing: I quit and moved back to Boulder and founded my own non-profit research institution, the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR). My wife and I run CSWR, manage the DOWs as National Science Foundation (NSF) Facilities, and conduct research programs such as the VORTEX2 study and hurricane studies. We have four young children who, so far, show no unhealthy obsessive interests in tornadoes, hurricanes or radars. I’ve just finished the VORTEX2 tornado study (http://vortex2.org), which is the largest tornado research mission ever, funded mostly by NSF, employing about 120 scientists and crew in 50 vehicles. We had 11 radars, 4 balloon trucks, UAVs, 40 deployable instruments, 13 mobile mesonets, photogrammetry and microphysics teams, damage survey teams, basically more of anything that used to study tornadoes scientifically. Just imagine the lines for fuel and bathrooms in small-town gas stations. During WWW, I’ll be keeping a nervous eye out for any hurricanes threatening to make landfall. If a hurricane looms, I’ll be leading my team into the eye.

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