How RAL plans to meet its strategic goals
The ability of RAL to meet its strategic goals depends strongly on the ability to anticipate where the opportunities and challenges will be, given the complex interaction of advancing technologies, changing work forces, organizational constraints, political policies, and advancing and declining budgets in a continually shifting economic situation in the U.S. and the world. RAL has made its best estimate of these challenges and opportunities in this plan; however, as these estimates shifts year-to-year, RAL will make corrections to its plan and targets. Given its overwhelming fraction of soft money support, RAL is necessarily opportunistic in addressing specific issues, and must remain agile in its ability to design, propose, and take on new projects in a timely way.
RAL will conduct an assessment of this plan annually, within each Program and across the laboratory in general in the context of broader assessments at the NCAR, UCAR and NSF levels.
How RAL plans to measure success in meeting its strategic goals
RAL’s success in technology transfer will largely be measured in several ways:
- In the eyes of our sponsor, has RAL met its obligations to deliver the highest quality science and technology to their operational domain?
- Has RAL established a long-running, collaborative and mutually trusting relationship with its sponsor?
- Has RAL’s work led to a higher level of safety, productivity, or efficiency in the sponsor’s activity?
- Have RAL’s activities satisfied or exceeded the sponsor’s needs to the point that the sponsor wishes to continue the relationship?
- Is RAL tracking and contributing to scientific and technical breakthroughs, and using these as guiding principles to meet our sponsor's future needs?
RAL will also be measured within the NSF, NCAR and university communities by how well it has contributed to their broad missions. These include not only the topic of technology transfer and its focus on service to society, but also other topics including:
- The advancement of fundamental scientific knowledge through research and collaboration with scientists in other parts of NCAR, the universities, and other laboratories
- The timely publication of peer-reviewed papers
- Education and Outreach to national and international groups
- Support to the community through
- development and support of community models
- service on national and international advisory panels, editorial boards, National Academy of Science committees, etc
- advice to governments and non-governmental organizations as requested
- planning and chairing national and international conferences, and leading or participating in field campaigns
- service on academic thesis committees
- advocacy for the broad atmospheric sciences with government agencies and weather-sensitive industries
- leading and organizing the research community to meet operational needs.
As part of the ongoing documentation of its program accomplishments RAL will continue to maintain a Compendium of its activities including:
- Application areas
- Types of products produced
- Applied research areas
- Sponsors and projects
- Publications
- Engineering development and infrastructure
- Detection, diagnosis, data assimilation, and forecasting algorithms
- New measurement techniques and data processing algorithms
- Forecast evaluations conducted
- Operational evaluations performed
- Instrument and facility testing, development, and maintenance
- Field research programs and field demonstrations conducted
- Technology transfer activities carried out
- Interactions with universities and other laboratories
- Significant educational outreach to industry
- Private industry relationships
- Other collaborators (including state and local governments, and stakeholder groups)
- Licensed technologies
- Patents awarded
- Honors received
- National and international service, panels, committees, and advocacy activity
- Consultancies and projects in foreign countries
- Education and training activities
- Program development activities underway