In Our Own Words...

As the National Weather Service celebrates its 150th Anniversary in 2020, NWS employees and retirees are sharing their own memories and thoughts about our heritage. Read their stories in their own words below.

We at the NWS Heritage Project can’t complete such an enormous task without you! Whether you’re a current or former employee of the NWS, your memories and stories help us better understand the history of our agency, how we got to where we are today, and where we will go next. If you’re interested in writing a story or even providing us with some background information on an event, technology, era, or other memory from your time at the NWS, please check out the following guide and forms:

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Dr. Robert Serafin

Dr. Robert Serafin

Bringing Radar Expertise to the Development of NEXRAD

Editor’s Note: In 2010, NOAA Office of Atmospheric Research Communications Director Barry Reichenbaugh recorded a series of oral histories with key researchers and others involved in the National Weather Service Modernization and Associated Restructuring, or MAR, during the 1980s and 90s. These oral histories have been republished on the Voices of NOAA website. Reichenbaugh retired in 2018; we are indebted to him for undertaking this important project.

The National Weather Service Modernization and Associated Restructuring effort was an enormous undertaking, requiring a lot of moving parts in order to be successful. One of the most crucial parts of this process was the establishment of the National Academies’ National Weather Service Modernization Committee, a team of experts to help guide the agency through the changes ahead. Only the best and brightest were selected for such an important role — enter Dr. Robert Serafin of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). 

Dr. Serafin was recruited for the Committee after a long career in the field of radar meteorology and, later, atmospheric observation. His expertise had previously been sought-after based on his background with Doppler radar technology, and his advice was essential in procuring the technology for the NEXRAD system, one of the agency’s priorities during the MAR.

Here are two excerpts from his interview recorded in June 2010:

On the importance of the Committee to the MAR effort:

“The people who were on that committee were really committed. They came to the meetings. They had an interest in what was going on. They knew technically and scientifically what was going on. We had people who understood the human relations, the employee relations part of it; the committee was strongly committed to human engineering to be sure that the systems that were going to be procured were actually going to do the job and be useful to the engineers, scientists, meteorologists. We had a lot of interactions with the operational people. So something like that, that kind of a committee has a lot of value.”

On being a part of the MAR:

“It wasn’t something easy to do. It’s never easy to do good things, to break away from a paradigm … Politically, there were big challenges. Technically, there were big challenges. Organizationally, internally, externally there were big challenges. I was really happy to be a part of that in a small way.” 

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