Spotlight on: Lou Wicker

Lou Wicker got stuck with climatology. A lifelong procrastinator, Lou put off preregistering for a college calculus class. When the section he had to have was filled up, he got "stuck" choosing a climatology course instead.

At the time, Lou was in high school in Springfield, MO and was taking a college class at Southwest Missouri State University as part of an advanced study program available to seniors. He liked the weather -- having lived through classic lake-effect snow storms in New York state and seen a few of those late-summer severe squall lines with great roll clouds. But surely, he thought, studying the weather had to be boring. His assumption was shattered the moment he walked into the synoptic map room for the first time. Radar echoes? 500 mb maps? Severe weather watches? Now THAT was cool. Who knew?

Lou decided to make a career out of it, and went to OU in the fall of 1979 to obtain an undergraduate degree. He continued on at OU, obtaining a master's degree in 1986 working with Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen. Though storm chasing and field research helped define his career, he says he was in the right place at the right time to be drawn into modeling. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1990, and stayed for a two-year post-doc with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Lou then spent seven years on the faculty at Texas A&M before coming to NSSL in 1999 to do research full-time. Publishing one of the first papers on simulated tornadogenesis is one of his successes, he says, and the other would be the development of the Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching Radar (SMART-Radar). Lou says it was a successful collaboration built from "common interests and needs," along with the recognition that successful multiinstitutional collaborations require the right kind of people who are committed to a common goal.

His passion is to keep learning -- which fits with his job to "increase our understanding of severe storms and then help get that knowledge applied to real world problems." One of his current goals is to get a more detailed understanding of tornadogenesis and supercell processes. He then wants to create simulations at ultrafine resolutions and compare them with observations. Another goal is to leverage all the people and talent NSSL has to offer to develop real-time data assimilation systems for stormscale prediction using ensemble modeling methods.

Life radically changed for Lou and his wife, Kristy, this past summer with their adoption of a newborn son, Benjamin. Though Lou enjoys golfing (he helps organize the annual NSSL/SPC Employee Association golf tournament), reading (science fiction, biographies, and popular science), hiking (in the Rocky Mountains), and foster parenting exotic animals (capuchin monkeys, porcupines and deer), Benjamin's arrival has sparked a new passion!