Employee Spotlight: Mike Douglas

Mike Douglas is on a mission to solve a worldwide problem: to develop an affordable global observing system that will support global numerical weather prediction. Mike's first step is helping to develop regular observing systems in Latin America as part of NOAA's Pan American Climate Studies (PACS) program. Two to three people manage the logistics of 22 observing sites in 12 countries from Norman, OK on a small budget. Mike travels 4-5 months a year to visit the sites, teach training courses, and work with various governments. Mike also uses this opportunity to bring foreign students to train in the U.S. with the hope they use their knowledge when they return to their native country. His goal is to solve the observing system problems in Latin America before taking on Africa.

In elementary school, Mike, his brother, and a neighbor, built a weather station and took readings three times a day for 90 days without missing an observation. Mike was a geophysics major at UC-San Diego and UC-Berkeley until the last quarter of his senior year when he took a climate course that both intrigued him and answered many of his questions. He decided to pursue meteorology in graduate school and earned his M.S. at the University of Miami and his Ph.D. at Florida State University.

International travel is not new to Mike. His first overseas experience came during graduate school as he participated in a summer monsoon project in India and became an expert in P-3 flight based observations. Later, at the at the Wave Propagation Lab (now Environmental Technologies Lab) in Boulder, he participated in five field programs in the Arctic. Mike also ran the Mexican side of the SouthWest Area Monsoon Project (SWAMP), and when the opportunity opened up, he moved to Norman and NSSL.

Relaxing makes Mike feel guilty, he says. He has a greenhouse in his backyard where he grows cactus and succulents, an interest that began in high school in San Diego. He likes to do "natural history" travelling with his wife Rosario and tries to add vacation to his business trips to explore and photograph new vegetations and habitats.