Brian Blaylock Receives 2025 DeSouza Award

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Brian Blaylock from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory was the 2025 Russell L. DeSouza award winner.

 

Brian Blaylock from the United States Naval Research Laboratory has been awarded the 2025 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the NSF Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “substantive and sustained contributions of energy and expertise to the geosciences community that reflect the ideals of the NSF Unidata Program's mission” 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 allows for simplified access to the remotely-stored output from a variety of numerical weather prediction models.

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.

The DeSouza Award commendation text reads, in part:

You exemplify these ideals through your ongoing efforts to make numerical weather prediction model output more easily available to the Earth Systems Sciences community. Your work at the University of Utah to create an archive of High Resolution Rapid Refresh model output for use in research and education led to the creation of publicly available archives hosted on commercial cloud-computing services. Similarly, your development of the open source Herbie package has made accessing numerical weather prediction model output truly easy.

The 2025 DeSouza Award was presented to Blaylock during the 2025 Fall Meeting of the Unidata's Users Committee. As part of the award ceremony, Blaylock gave a talk talk titled "Raising the bar in Earth science research through education, tools, and training." We encourage you to watch his talk, which is available on Unidata's YouTube channel and is linked from the 2025 DeSouza Award page.