Dr. Jidong Gao is currently a research meteorologist for National Severe Storm Laboratory (NSSL)/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He earned all my academic degrees from Lanzhou University (BS 1988; MS 1991; PhD 1994). He has been working on radar data assimilation research area for about three decades since he got my PhD. His current major interest is in improving short-term storm prediction using remote-sensing data including WSR-88D radar data and satellite data. His research focuses on variational, ensemble, and hybrid data assimilation and their applications to Doppler radar data quality control, single/multiple Doppler velocity retrieval, and assimilating radar data into high resolution NWP models.

Dr. Gao has generated over $6.5 million in external research grants as a Principal Investigator (PI)/Co-PI during the past 28 years. He has advised 6 M.S. graduate students, 7 PhD students and 7 research associates/scientists with these grants. He regularly serves as the reviewers of many scientific journals and of proposals of national funding agencies. He is currently an Editor for AMS journal Monthly Weather Review. He has co-authored about 100 referred journal articles and over 120 conference papers. Dr. Gao has devoted a lot of time into development of a hybrid ensemble variational data assimilation system which can be used for providing initial conditions for the Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS), and Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) models, two nonhydrostatic mesoscale and convective scale NWP model.