Nonuniversity Research

A broad range of organizations, from government laboratories to privately owned companies, conducts nonuniversity research. On the government side there is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), under which there are a dozen environmental research laboratories. The more well-known labs include the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, which houses the Hurricane Research Division (Miami, Florida); the Climate Diagnostics Center (Boulder, Colorado); and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (Norman, Oklahoma). Each of the military services supports labs involved in atmospheric science work: the air force in Bedford, Massachusetts; the army at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; and the navy in Monterey, California.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is also involved in a variety of basic research programs at its research facilities: the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland; the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City falls under GSFC and, in cooperation with Columbia University, has been a leader in global change studies. Global change is an interdisciplinary research initiative addressing both natural and man-made changes in our environment.

Supporting NASA's research is the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) Goddard Visiting Scientist Program, operating out of Seabrook, Maryland. USRA is a nonprofit consortium of 80 universities chartered to broaden opportunities for collaboration between the academic and government space research communities. Although the term "space" is used, USRA often recruits scientists for global climate studies and research involving remote-sensing applications.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, also is heavily involved in global change studies, but as one would infer from its title, its research covers a myriad of atmospheric science disciplines. NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). UCAR is an international community of scientists, engineers, and technicians dedicated to enhancing understanding of the atmosphere. Among other things, UCAR recruits visiting scientists for various government and military research efforts. It also manages the NOAA Postdoctoral Program in Climate and Global Change. This program pairs recently graduated postdoctorates with host scientists at U.S. institutions. The objective of the program is to help create the next generation of researchers needed for global climate studies.

Complementing government research work, a number of private organizations, many of them small businesses, perform both applied and basic research. Most of the larger corporations doing research centered around the atmospheric sciences advertise their capabilities in the BAMS professional directory.

In addition to government/commercial research and pure university research (referenced below), there is an array of cooperative, joint sponsor, and management affiliations involved in atmospheric science studies. An example of this is the NASA GISS/Columbia University arrangement. The Department of Energy (DOE) has a number of "national laboratories" managed by universities and corporations. Examples of two DOE labs doing work in meteorology are the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (California) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (New Mexico), both managed by the University of California. Representative of other types of cooperative or joint structures are Scripps Institution of Oceanography's International Research Institute affiliation with the University of California, and the Desert Research Institute's link to the University of Nevada. NOAA is involved in a number of joint institutes as well. Among them are the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, located at Colorado State University, and government laboratories such as the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, associated with Princeton University.

Other Corporations, Institutions, Organizations