CPAESS Staff Recognized at NOAA OAR Awards

On December 5, NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) recognized staff for their outstanding contributions during the year of 2023. Steve Thur, Assistant Administrator for OAR explained “These awards recognize extraordinary achievements by individuals and groups and for making invaluable contributions to both our mission and OAR’s workforce.” The recipients were recognized at the OAR All Hands Meeting & Recognition Ceremony in the NOAA Auditorium.

Among these recipients were 4 of our co-workers: Bao Xiang, CPAESS Project Scientist III at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL); Matthew Morin, CPAESS Associate Scientist III at GFDL; Kathy Tedesco, CPAESS Program Manager at NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing (GOMO) office; and Courtney Witkowski, CPAESS Program Specialist III at NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program (OAP). As these are federal awards it is a unique honor for staff who act as partners with NOAA offices to be acknowledged. SPS | CPAESS Director Hanne Mauriello said “I so appreciate OAR for being so inclusive in recognizing the hard work of our scientists and staff in their awards. We are grateful for NOAA’s acknowledgment of these exceptional individuals.”

Courtney Witkowski received an award as a Team Member of the Year in Administrative and Technical Support for successfully scoping, drafting, revising, and shepherding through many layers of review and approval of three high-level Interagency reports for Congress. Of this Courtney shared “I am grateful to be recognized for leading the Interagency Working Group on Ocean Acidification in submitting three reports to Congress this past year, including the first national ocean acidification vulnerability assessment. Working in the interagency space has been a great learning experience and I am thankful to all the partners who contributed to these efforts.”

Both Baoqiang Xiang and Matthew Morin received awards for Team Members of the Year in Personal and Professional Excellence for exceptional collaborative development of frontier, unified weather-to-subseasonal prediction systems. Matt describes his work as “my particular role in this group effort was mainly to run the SHiELD models (including C-SHiELD, T-SHiELD, and Tele-SHiELD) in real-time and retrospectively to generate very large forecast data sets that are used to further model developments.”

Last but not least, Kathy Tedesco won a Team Member of the Year in Leadership for leadership in carbon cycle science leading to innovative products and services that allow the world to understand, predict, and combat climate change. Of Kathy’s contributions, Jess Snowden, Deputy Director of GOMO wrote “Dr. Tedesco's work has advanced OAR and NOAA's critical leadership role in carbon cycle science leading to innovative information, products, and services that allow the world to understand, predict, and combat climate change. She has done so through consensus building across a disparate community of scientists, co-development of research and observing priorities leading to strategic investments in impactful research, and steadfast leadership of US and international carbon cycle science in a rapidly evolving field of study. She is also a deeply respected and exemplary supervisor who provides thoughtful mentorship of numerous GOMO employees.”

We are extraordinarily proud of each of you and greatly appreciate your successful efforts to advance Earth system science. A most sincere congratulations!