Contact: Keli Tarp
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COMMERCE DEPARTMENT AWARDS BRONZE MEDAL TO NORMAN RESIDENT

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has awarded its Bronze Medal to Kevin Kelleher, deputy director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. The Bronze Medal is the highest honorary award given by NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It is granted by the administrator for a significant contribution to NOAA or the department.

Kelleher was presented the award Nov. 29 by NOAA Acting Administrator Scott Gudes at a ceremony in College Park, Md. He is being recognized for his outstanding work over the past several years in leading the high performance networking enhancements for the NOAA/Norman Weather Partners and for fostering a strong collaboration between the University of Oklahoma and the NOAA Weather Partners with the NOAA Advanced Research Network. He led an effort to obtain grant funding over several years from the NOAA High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) office in Silver Spring, Md., to fund the network upgrades. Four other NOAA employees were also recognized for similar projects throughout the U.S.

In addition, Kelleher was also given an award for the Best Use of High Performance Networking at the NOAATECH 2002 Workshop recently held at NOAA Headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. This award was given for his work to make the National Weather Services’s WSR-88D radar data
available over the Internet in realtime for research and archival by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The prototype project makes use of the Next Generation Internet (Abilene) high speed network. Previously, these data were available only by 8mm tape after weeks or months of delay. The radar data project is a collaboration between the National Weather Service, University of Oklahoma Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, University of Oklahoma School of Computer Science and NCDC.

Kelleher has been with NSSL for nearly 15 years. He holds master’s degrees in meteorology and computer science from the University of Oklahoma.