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Call For Papers
The Texas Weather Conference: Preparedness to Prediction to Protection
The inaugural Texas Weather Conference, organized by the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio Weather Forecast Office (WFO) in collaboration with other local WFOs, emergency management officials, broadcast meteorologists, and universities will be held on February 5-6, 2016 at the University of Texas Commons Learning Center in Austin, TX. Program, registration, and hotel accommodation information is available at our website, www.txwxconference.com.
With the theme of “Preparedness to Prediction to Protection,” The Texas Weather Conference seeks to combine the experience, knowledge, and vision of all those with a stake in weather and climate in the state of Texas. Public, private, and broadcast meteorologists will join with emergency management officials as well as scientists and students from Texas universities to discuss the latest in preparedness, prediction, and response to high-impact weather events. Sharing cutting-edge research and operational experiences from multiple perspectives is expected to unify common goals and needs of the Texas weather community towards future action minimizing the detrimental impacts of weather and climate on society.
Papers are solicited in a variety of fields relevant to the scope of the conference, including: severe weather; river and flash flood forecasting; winter weather; drought and water resources; fire weather; air quality; tropical weather and coastal flooding. Each session will blend the latest in scientific understanding with presentations on risk communication and response. Therefore, interdisciplinary sociological studies on high-impact weather will be of particular interest.
In addition to oral presentation sessions and short courses, abstracts are also solicited for a poster session encompassing the topics listed above. Student poster submissions are particularly encouraged.
Please submit abstracts at our website, www.txwxconference.com, no later than November 30, 2015. There is no fee for abstract submission and abstracts are limited to one per participant. Please indicate at the time of submission if you prefer an oral or poster presentation. Oral presentations will be limited based on the number of submissions and time constraints. Authors of accepted presentations will be notified by email and a preliminary program will be posted by mid-December 2015.
For additional general information, please contact the organizing committee at txwxconference@gmail.com. Contact information for all committee members is also posted on the website if you have specific questions to address to them.
Keynote Speakers
Bill Read
Former Director, NHC
Bill Read retired as Director of the National Hurricane Center in 2012 after a long and distinguished career in the NWS. Bill served as an officer in the U.S. Navy where he flew with the Navy Hurricane Hunters. Bill earned his Bachelors and Masters of Science in Meteorology from Texas A&M University. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and has served as President of the National Weather Association. Bill has been recognized for numerous awards, most recently for the Neal Frank Award given at the 2015 National Hurricane Conference.
David Maidment
University of Texas, Austin
David R. Maidment is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1981. He is a specialist in surface water hydrology and in the application of geographic information systems to hydrology. He is the leader of the participation of the academic community in a National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) being conducted in collaboration with the National Water Center to develop a new National Water Model of the United States.
Christopher Weiss
Texas Tech University
Dr. Weiss is an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science at Texas Tech University. His primary research interests include dryline dynamics, convection initiation, and supercell and tornado structure. Over the past decade, he has been involved in a number of field projects aimed at using in situ and mobile radar platforms to improve our understanding of how tornadoes form and how their structure evolves near the surface (e.g., the Verification of the Origin of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2)). He will again be in the field this spring for the VORTEX-SE project, where he and the Texas Tech research team will deploy instrumented in situ probes across northern Alabama and southern Tennessee in an effort to learn more about unique environmental factors that contribute to tornado development in this section of the country.
Chief Nim Kidd
Texas Department of Emergency Management
W. Nim Kidd serves as the Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM). In this capacity, he is responsible for the state’s emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation activities. Since assuming this role on July 1, 2010, the state has managed seven presidential disaster declarations, two emergency declarations, and 58 Fire Management Assistance Grant (FMAG) declarations.
Prior to serving with DPS, Chief Kidd was appointed to the San Antonio Fire Department (SAFD) in April of 1993 and acted as Emergency Manager for the city of San Antonio from 2004 to 2010. He is an original member of Texas Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue Team, acting as the Task Force Plans Section Chief for the World Trade Center attack in September 2001.
Currently, Chief Kidd serves as a subcommittee chair for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Advisory Council (NAC), and as a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) Commissioner with the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM).
Chief Kidd holds a Masters of Public Administration from Texas State University, a bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M University-Commerce, and two associates degrees. He is both a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM®) and a certified Texas Emergency Manager (TEM® ).
John Nielsen-Gammon
Texas A&M University
Texas State Climatologist
Dr. Nielsen-Gammon is a Regents Professor at Texas A&M University and the Texas State Climatologist. Dr. Nielsen-Gammon received a B.S. in Earth and Planetary Sciences (1984), an M.S. in Meteorology (1987), and a Ph.D. in Meteorology (1990), all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Nielsen-Gammon joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in 1991 and was appointed Texas State Climatologist by then-Governor George W. Bush in 2000. Dr. Nielsen-Gammon conducts research on large-scale and local-scale meteorology, basic and applied climatology, and air pollution meteorology. He teaches courses in weather analysis and forecasting, climate, climate change, and computer modeling. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
Committee Information
External Members:
Dr. Brian Ancell: Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Science, Texas Tech University
Markie Casebier: Executive Office Administrator, Texas Floodplain Management Association
Colleen Coyle: Meteorologist, WFAA-TV (ABC), Dallas Fort-Worth
Melissa Huffman: General Forecaster, National Weather Service, Houston/Galveston WFO
Steven Long: Wireless System Manager, Bastrop County Office of Emergency Management
Dr. Chris Nowotarski: Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Science, Texas A&M University
Roy Sedwick, CFM: Executive Director, Texas Floodplain Management Association
Dr. Zong-Liang Yang: Professor and Director of the Center for Integrated Earth System Science, University of Texas
Austin/San Antonio National Weather Service WFO Members (Host):
Trevor Boucher, General Forecaster
Nick Hampshire, Lead Forecaster
Dr. Larry Hopper, Meteorologist, Co-Chair
Aaron Treadway, Meteorologist
Jon Zeitler, Science and Operations Officer, Co-Chair
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