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Michael J Dixon |
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| Software Engineer Biographical Sketch Mike Dixon grew up in Southern Africa. He attended the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa where he received a B.Sc and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering, with a specialization in hydrology. After leaving the university he worked for the Department of Water Affairs, analyzing the so-called 'downwind shadow effect' of cloud seeding on precipitation patterns. This work stimulated a career-long interest in the scientific aspects of weather modification. Mike obtained an M.S. from Colorado State University, before returning to South Africa, where he obtained experience as a consulting and construction engineer, working on the Bloukrans concrete arch bridge, the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. He then went back to the weather modification field, working on the PAWS project in the Transvaal Lowveld. He developed the TITAN software for the automated identification of thunderstorms in radar data, with built-in capabilities for the objective analysis of weather modification effects. During this period Mike also worked in Australia as an enviromental engineer on river restoration projects. Mike then pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which he received in 1994. He worked with CADSWES (the Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems) and the USGS, where he was the lead developemnt engineer on the Modular Modelling System (MMS) now used widely by the USGS to support hydrologic modelling. He then joined the Research Applications Program at NCAR, where he updated his TITAN software package to work in realtime on FAA-related projects. The software is now in wide use around the world for tracking storms, performing nocasting tasks, and as a tool for the evaluation of weather modification projects. The upgraded software was used successfully to evaluate the PARC weather modification experiment in northern Mexico from 1996 to 1998. During his tenure at NCAR Mike has been a senior software engineer on a number of aviation weather projects, including the wind-shear warning system for the new Hong-Kong international airport, the ground-deicing system for the FAA, and the Advanced Operational Aviation Weather System (AOAWS) for the government of Taiwan. Most recently, Mike has been working on algorithms for estimating and forecasting surface visibility in snow, using radar and ASOS data, and on advanced spectral processing techniques for the NEXRAD ORDA upgrade. |
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