To honor our Distinguished Professor Emeritus Robert D. Cess, ITPA established the distinguished TAOS seminar speaker program by naming a speaker after him each year. We are pleased to announce that this year’s Robert. D. Cess Distinguished TAOS seminar speaker is Dr. David A. Randall of the Colorado State University.

Dr. David Randall is a world renowned atmospheric scientist specializing in development and applications of global atmospheric models and their coupling with land-surface, ocean, and sea-ice models. His research spans a wide range of topics including stratiform and convective clouds, boundary-layer turbulence, cloud-radiative interactions, coupling of the atmosphere with underlying surfaces, climate dynamics, and numerical methods. He pioneered several methods that are used in the climate modeling community, including the use of Single-Column Models (SCM) and Cloud System Resolving Models to improve physical parameterizations in general circulation models. Dr. Randall is currently professor of the department of atmospheric sciences in the Colorado State University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from UCLA in 1976. A fellow of the American Meteorological Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Geophysical Union, Dr. Randall also served on numerous government panels and committees, including Cheif Editor of the Journal of Climate, Chair of the International GEWEX Cloud System Studies (GCSS), Chair of the Science Team Executive Committee of the DOE ARM program, and co-chair of the Atmospheric Modeling Working group of NCAR.

Minghua Zhang, David Randall, Robert D. Cess

Dr. Randall’s seminar was given on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 with the title “Floating Honeycombs: Simulating the Atmosphere and Ocean with Geodesic Grids and Quasi-Lagrangian Vertical Coordinates.”