DUSAN
(pronounced Dushan) S. ZRNIC (pronounced Zernich, born 1942 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia)
is Leader of the Doppler Radar and Remote Sensing Research at the National Severe
Storms Laboratory (NSSL) as well as a senior scientist. He is also an Adjunct
Professor of Meteorology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma.
After employment as a research and teaching assistant with the Charged Particle Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department of the California State University, Northridge, CA in 1969. He became Associate Professor in 1974, and Professor in 1978. During the 1973-1974 academic year, Dr. Zrnic was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the NSSL, and in 1975-1976 he was on sabbatical research leave from California State University at the same laboratory.
His research experience includes circuit design, applied mathematics, magnetohydrodynamics, radar signal processing and systems design. Recently he has spent considerable effort towards improvements of weather radar signal processing, advancements of polarimetric measurements and their interpretation, and development of algorithms for NEXRAD.
Since
1976 he has been a member of URSI Commissions C and F; he is a fellow of the
AMS and a fellow of the IEEE. Twice he has been awarded the Best Research Paper
Award by the Environmental Research Laboratories. He has published extensively
on weather radar signal processing, radar meteorology, and remote sensing. His
most important and representative publication is the book Doppler
Radar and Weather Observations, New York, Academic Press, 1984, second edition
1993, co-authored with Dr. Richard Doviak. Dusan is a co-recipient of the IEEE
1988 Harry Diamond Memorial Award for contributions to and applications of weather
radar science, he is sharing the 1993 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Award with Dr.
P. Mahapatra and is a reciepient with R.V. Ryzhkov of the WMO 1996 Vaisala award.
Dusan believes that remote sensing shines but in situ measurements reign (Winston Churchill circa XX centure AD); see him checking Doppler winds at Lake Thunderbird 17 km from the KOUN1 radar. His message to facilitators is "best dentistry is least dentistry".