Dr. Mohan Ramamurthy
Dr. Mohan Ramamurthy is the Director of UCAR’s Unidata Program and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Dr. Ramamurthy joined UCAR in January 2003 after spending nearly 16 years on the faculty in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Ramamurthy received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Poona in India. He earned his Ph. D. in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, where his doctoral research dealt with the four-dimensional assimilation of data and modeling of disturbances associated with monsoons.
As Director, Dr. Ramamurthy leads a staff of about 25 administrative and software professionals at the Unidata Program Center. Unidata provides a broad array of data for use in geoscience education and research. In addition to providing data, Unidata also develops software for data access, processing, management, analysis, and visualization and provides support to a diverse community of over 160 academic institutions vested in the common goal of sharing data. Under Dr. Ramamurthy’s direction Unidata has:
- Broadened the scope and range of communities served
- Facilitated multidisciplinary synthesis and societal impact studies through GIS integration
- Improved remote access to and real-time delivery of data
- Developed visualization and analysis software
- Advanced data infrastructure technologies
- Enhanced community outreach and collaboration with stakeholders
- Initiated projects to extend Unidata technologies into a Grid environment
Dr. Ramamurthy’s atmospheric science research interests are in weather processes and prediction, including mesoscale phenomena such as gravity waves, precipitation bands, hurricanes, and ensemble forecasting. His other research interests include information technology, interactive-multimedia instruction and learning, and end-to-end data services.
