2025 DeSouza Award

Brian Blaylock, U.S. Naval Research Lab

The Russell L. DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”

Brian Blaylock is responsible for two initiatives that the NSF Unidata Users Committee was eager to recognize as especially valuable to the Earth Systems Sciences community. The first was his work to begin an archive of High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model forecasts at the University of Utah. The HRRR is arguably the best model in the world at convective-scale modeling, yet prior to Brian's efforts, there was no archive of the output for use in research. This project enabled researchers and educators to access HRRR output and led to a Zarr-based archive of the output which has now been carried on by others (and eventually moved into the AWS cloud).

The other is his ongoing development of the open-source "Herbie" python package for accessing numerical weather prediction model output. Herbie is incredibly user-friendly and simple, such that it makes accessing NWP model output truly easy.

Overall, Brian's development of these tools really has reduced "time to science" in meteorology, which is exactly in the spirit of NSF Unidata's mission and of the DeSouza award.

A video recording of the award presentation and Brian's seminar is linked below and is available on the NSF Unidata YouTube Channel. Brian's presentation slides are also available.

Questions About the Desouza Award?

Questions or comments about the Desouza Award can be sent to: support@unidata.ucar.edu