Scientific Leadership
Exceptional Contributors to AER and the Larger Community
AER staff members serve as faculty and instructors at area universities, and serve with university and government colleagues on numerous committees, such as those of the National Research Council. AER staff are active participants in professional journal review boards as well as panel and mail proposal reviews for government agencies. AER scientists also actively participate in the workings of such professional organizations as the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). AER scientists have served as President of the AMS and as Vice Chairman of the ECMWF Scientific Advisory Committee.Judah Cohen, Ph.D.
Dr. Cohen joined AER as a staff scientist in 1998, having previously spent two years as a National Research Council Fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and then two years as a research scientist at MIT's Parsons Laboratory. Cohen received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from Columbia University in 1994 and has since focused on conducting numerical experiments with global climate models and advanced statistical techniques to better understand climate variability and to improve climate prediction. In addition to his research interests, Cohen is leading AER's development of seasonal forecasts for commercial clients. A member of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, Cohen has published over two dozen articles in their journals and others.Janusz Eluszkiewicz, Ph.D.
Dr. Eluszkiewicz holds a MSc in physics from Warsaw University, a PhD in planetary science from Caltech, and has acquired additional educational and professional experience at other leading institutions, including Oxford and MIT. In addition to his position in the Research and Development Division at AER, he is a staff member in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Harvard. Dr. Eluszkiewicz is an interdisciplinary scientist, with numerous publications in scientific journals and books. His interests range from the atmospheres and surfaces of Earth and Mars to the physics of volatile ices in the Outer Solar System. Currently, Dr. Eluszkiewicz is the Principal Investigator on several projects funded by NASA and the Department of Defense.Gary Gustafson
Mr. Gustafson has been active in the field of remote sensing of cloud and precipitation systems from passive space-borne sensors and active ground based systems for over twenty years. Recent work has focused on development and real-data testing of retrieval techniques for cloud and aerosol properties using satellite and aircraft based electro-optical sensor measurements. Particular emphasis has been on the application of those techniques to operational programs. Research interests include identification of cloud spectral signatures in multispectral sensor data, inference of cloud macrophysical properties through spatial and spectral clustering approaches, and interactive image processing and visualization for manual scene interpretation. He has participated in numerous studies for both commercial and governmental organizations including the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Weather Agency, Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, ITT, Sterling Software, EarthSat, FAA, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Defense Mapping Agency, and the Bureau of Reclamation.David B. Hogan
Mr. David Hogan is currently Vice President of the Programs and Systems Division at AER. He received a B.S in physical sciences and an M.S. in meteorology (remote sensing) from the University of Maryland. With almost thirty years of advanced system design and development experience, Mr. Hogan's career focus has been on the development of advanced science solutions for challenging environmental and remote sensing problems and transition to operational systems. He has extensive experience managing large programs with diverse technical teams composed of multiple contractors and has been successful in delivering tasks on schedule and within budget. He also manages the group that developed and supports AERs operational forecast designed specifically for the financial markets.Prakash Karamchandani, Ph.D.
Dr. Prakash Karamchandani, Senior Project Manager in the Air Quality Division joined Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. in February of 1996. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kentucky and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. Dr. Karamchandani has over 20 years of experience in air quality modeling for issues such as ozone, particulate matter, acid deposition, atmospheric visibility, nitrogen deposition, and air toxics. Dr. Karamchandani was the technical lead for the development of state-of-the-science reactive plume models (e.g., SCICHEM) and also led the development and application of an advanced treatment of stack plumes in air quality modeling. He has recently developed a sub-grid scale treatment of roadway emissions using a plume-in-grid approach. Dr. Karamchandani has also been involved in several air toxics modeling studies (e.g., mercury, dioxins) and atmospheric deposition modeling projects (acid and nitrogen deposition). He is currently the co-PI for an EPA STAR project to study the impact of global change on air quality using the Urban-to-Global WRF/Chem. He is also the principal investigator for a study to improve the treatment of chemistry in the regulatory model, CALPUFF, and to evaluate the model.Alan Lipton, Ph.D.
While at AER, Dr. Lipton has developed algorithms, managed and conducted research in support of the development of the Conical-Scanning Microwave Imager/Sounder (CMIS), an instrument that is planned for flight on satellites of the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Dr. Lipton has also performed research on radiative transfer and assimilation of satellite data in numerical weather prediction models. Prior to joining AER, he planned, executed, and reported results of research projects involving methods for retrieving meteorological information from satellite data and exploiting satellite data to improve numerical weather analysis and prediction. The work incorporated radiative transfer computation, meteorological analysis, mesoscale modeling, and data assimilation.Eli Mlawer, Ph.D.
Dr. Mlawer’s main areas of interest include atmospheric radiative transfer, climate study, and the characterization of molecular collisional broadening. As part of his involvement in the DoE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, Dr. Mlawer is the coordinator of the Broadband Heating Rate Profile VAP, an effort to compute fluxes and heating rates in clear and cloudy conditions at the ARM sites and to perform a closure analysis on these calculations using surface and TOA radiation measurements. He has primary responsibility for the design, implementation, and validation of RRTM, a radiative transfer model for climate applications used by many climate and NWP models. Dr. Mlawer is a key participant in the research being conducted with a number of climate models utilizing RRTM, and continues to actively partake in the Intercomparison of Radiation Codes in Climate Models effort. He is the lead developer of the MT_CKD water vapor continuum model, a new formulation of the well-regarded CKD continuum. In recent research, Dr. Mlawer utilized spectral comparisons of solar irradiance measurements and calculations to determine that there are no unknown molecular absorbers of significance in the solar regime, as had been previously suggested.George Modica, M.S.
Mr. Modica's work in exploratory development studies in numerical mesoscale analysis and forecasting, including four-dimensional data assimilation of satellite data, development of microphysics parameterizations for aircraft icing studies, assessment of the effect of complex soil and vegetation parameterizations on the evolving mesoscale fields has been of direct benefit to his DoD clients. His work continues in advanced development activities including technology transition of diagnostic turbulence and icing algorithms to the Air Force Weather Agency.Jean-Luc Moncet, Principal Scientist, Remote Sensing Division
Mr. Moncet is heading the Remote Sensing Programs at AER, which oversees the activities of the Infrared, Microwave, Trace gases and Cloud remote sensing groups. During his accumulated sixteen years of experience in infrared, microwave and UV remote sensing and radiative transfer modeling, he has lead the EDR algorithm development effort for the NPOESS/CrIMSS payload and is currently leading the algorithm development effort for the NPOESS/CMIS instrument. Mr. Moncet has served as principal investigator in several other government funded research programs and has been involved in the DoD DMSP Block 6 program, the NPOESS Phase0 study and contributed to the development of the Air Force TACNEPH nephanalysis program. He is co-developer of the Unified Retrieval concept, initially applied to the DMSP Block 5D-3 microwave sensors and now used in the CMIS, AMSU, CrIS and OMPS EDR algorithms, and participated to the SSMT-2 and SSMIS cal/val effort. Since joining AER, he has developed high speed, high spectral resolution radiative transfer algorithms (including the Optimal Spectral Sampling (OSS) method [US Patent] and the CHARTS code for monochromatic radiance calculations in scattering atmospheres) and inversion algorithms for application to space borne infrared down-looking and limb sensors, airborne and ground based interferometers. He also provided support to the aerospace industry for several instrument trade studies. Other areas of activity include cloud properties retrieval from infrared spectrometric measurements and combined microwave/electro-optical imagers, NWP model assimilation and radiation/climate studies. Mr. Moncet is member of the NASA AMSR and AIRS science teams.
Thomas Nehrkorn, Ph.D.
Dr. Thomas Nehrkorn, Senior Staff Scientist and Director of Tropical Forecasting in the Numerical Weather Prediction Group, has been with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. since 1985. He received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from MIT with Kerry Emmanuel as his thesis advisor. Prior to that, Dr. Nehrkorn studied and received his M.S. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University under William Cotton, and his B.S in Meteorology from The University of Hamburg, Germany.
Dr. Nehrkorn's 22 year research tenure at AER has included work on numerical weather prediction models, data assimilation systems, humidity to cloud relationships, three dimensional analysis of atmospheric quantities and studies of the angular momentum budget of the atmosphere. His prior work in hurricane modeling focused on probabilistic track and intensity forecasts resulting in the release of a hurricane track forecast in late 2001. Currently he oversees the production of the short range probabilistic hurricane forecast for CHI Futures contracts trading and a long range consulting service for the insurance and reinsurance industry. His research activities revolve around tropical cyclone simulations and prediction models, 3D and 4D variational analysis schemes, ensemble forecasting techniques and coupling of mesoscale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models to Atmospheric Transport and Dispersion (ADT) models.
He is a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and has published and presented over 80 papers in refereed journals and technical conferences.