Spotlight on: Dave Priegnitz
We associate Dave Priegnitz (CIMMS) with running -- running nearly every day over the lunch hour on the trails surrounding NSSL, and training for the half-dozen races a year that occupy his time. He says running relaxes him. If you saw his face while he runs you would agree. Though his nine marathons are an impressive accomplishment, Dave claims his biggest personal success sits on 100 acres southwest of Pauls Valley, OK. Dave and his wife, Virginia, took two years to build their own home, designing it themselves online. They and their son Nathan (17) enjoy the solitude of the countryside with their cats, chickens, guineas, and ducks.
Dave grew up in Algonquin, IL, northwest of Chicago, and witnessed the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak in 1965. He remembers the F4 tornado going through Crystal Lake, about 5 miles north of his home. From then on he kept his eyes on the weather. Dave graduated Northern Illinois University with a B.S. in geosciences (meteorology) and went on to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to earn his M.S. degree in geography (meteorology). He had always planned to forecast, but the first job he found was in weather modification research and data analysis and software support at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT) in Rapid City, SD. During his time there, Dave wrote software for the data systems on a T-28 research aircraft used in a hail research field project in Switzerland. Another memorable experience was watching grapefruit-sized hail plow up a field during a hail suppression project. Later, Dave worked for a contractor located at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, NE, on the Satellite Data Handling System (SDHS) project. Omaha was also where he met his wife Virginia, who was in the Air Force. From there they made a brief stop in Austin, TX, before moving back to Rapid City and SDSMT, where he developed software to aid weather radar research.
The Open Systems Radar Product Generator (ORPG) project brought Dave to NSSL in 1996, and he became the primary developer for the human-computer interface to the RPG component of the WSR-88D. Now his focus is on "learning the nuts and bolts of the Phased Array radar." He wants to help make the National Weather Radar Testbed a world-class facility easily accessible to researchers.
We still associate Dave with running. Now that his home is complete, his running has picked up again. His goal is to run another marathon within the next 12 months (once he turns 50) and finish it in under three hours. Dave has tracked his miles over the years--he has less than 7000 miles to go before having run roughly the equivalent of the circumference of the earth at the equator (24,901.55 miles)!
