Dr. Patrick T. Welsh

Dr. Patrick T. Welsh is currently Executive Director of the Advanced Weather Information Systems Laboratory, University of North Florida. Pat was one of the first Oceanography majors at the U. S. Naval Academy, and later earned a Master’s degree in Meteorology working on turbulent air-sea interaction. After retiring as a Navy Oceanographer he returned to academia, and received his Ph.D. degree in Physical Meteorology from the Florida State University as a NASA-Florida Space Grant Fellow. Dr. Welsh was the first Science and Operations Officer (SOO) at the Jacksonville Weather Forecast Office, a new NEXRAD Doppler radar facility for ten years, until joining UNF. Pat has had frequent leadership roles in multi-agency collaborative projects between NOAA, U. S. Navy, local universities, and state agencies. He was an active participant in the NOAA Coastal Storms Initiative (Florida Pilot Project), as part of the team that first used the Weather Research and Forecast Model in the operational environment to produce highly successful sea breeze and convective rainfall forecasts for Florida and the recent 2004 Florida Hurricanes. He has been a collaborating scientist in two National Ocean Partnership Project (NOPP) grants and the South East Atlantic Coastal Ocean Observing System (SEACOOS) cooperative. Pat was invited to serve as a session Co-Chair at U.S. Weather Research Program (USWRP) national workshop on Mesoscale Observing Systems in December 2003; Co-Chair, Integrated Ocean Observing System working group on Improved Hurricane Storm Surge forecasts (2005); and session Chair for Future Developments at the ITS Florida Conference on Road Weather Information Systems (2005). Pat was the National winner of the Individual Operational Achievement Award (2002) from the National Weather Association. Pat is an active proponent of coastal ocean and environmental observing systems in the Southeast U.S., and is active in wireless autonomous data networking and assimilation research.