Norman, Okla. — The University of Oklahoma Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies and School of Meteorology announce the addition of Dr. Greg McFarquhar to their staffs.
McFarquhar will be the Director of OU CIMMS and a School of Meteorology Professor starting this fall. Randy Peppler has been interim director after former OU CIMMS director and Meteorology Professor Dr. Peter Lamb passed away in May 2014.
“We look forward to Greg leading CIMMS in innovative ways in order to help address future NOAA research challenges in weather radar and mesoscale meteorology,” Peppler said.
McFarquhar comes from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He has worked at the university since 2001. He has also served as a visiting faculty fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado from 2015 to 2016.
McFarquhar’s PhD and his Masters of Science are in Atmospheric Physics and his Bachelors of Science is in Mathematics and Physics, all from the University of Toronto.
Director of the National Weather Center Dr. Berrien Moore said, “The University of Oklahoma is delighted to have a gifted scientist and extraordinary leader join the OU family as the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies. The possibilities are endless!”
McFarquhar has been involved with more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, the investigator or principal investigator for 45 different grants and involved in more than 20 field campaigns.
“After being involved in many different projects at other universities and research institutes over the past 25 years investigating the impact of clouds on various weather phenomena, I am looking forward to broadening my horizons with even more exciting work over the next several years at CIMMS and The University of Oklahoma,” McFarquhar said. “I am especially impressed with the credentials of the amazing people already working here. I hope that I can strengthen and improve the existing collaborations and partnerships already, as well as finding new avenues for improving the observation, analysis, understanding and prediction of weather elements and systems.”
CIMMS was established in 1978 as a cooperative program that unites the scientific and technical resources of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and OU into a center of research excellence. CIMMS was created to support NOAA’s Mission of Science, Service and Stewardship and thereby contribute to NOAA’s long-term goal of building a Weather-Ready Nation that is prepared for and responds to weather-related events. CIMMS research areas include weather radar, hydrometeorology, observations and numerical modeling of high-impact weather including severe storms, forecast and warning improvements, regional climate variations, the societal and socioeconomic impacts of weather and climate, and related subject areas.