AMS Community Profiles

Bill Gail, an AMS Member, and the AMS President for 2014, is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Global Weather Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. GWC is a privately held company that provides precision weather forecasts to businesses within the energy, media, and transportation sectors. Dr. Gail has an undergraduate degree in physics and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where his research focused on plasma physics in the Earth's magnetosphere. During this period, he spent a year as cosmic ray field scientist at South Pole Station. Dr. Gail is a lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council, having served on a number of NRC committees including the Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space and the current Committee on the Assessment of the National Weather Service's Modernization Program. He serves or has served on a variety of corporate and organizational boards including Peak Weather Resources Inc., Women in Aerospace, Imaging Notes magazine, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing (acting), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Applied Sciences Program Advisory Group. He has also served as Associate Editor for the SPIE Journal of Applied Remote Sensing and Director of Industry Relations for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. He has published extensively on both technical and policy issues, and has been cited by AGU for excellence in scientific journal review.

Before joining GWC, Dr. Gail was a Director with Microsoft Corporation. As a Director in the Startup Business Group he was responsibile for enabling breakthroughs in consumer software. Earlier he held similar positions within the Microsoft Public Sector and Virtual Earth organizations.

Before joining Microsoft, Dr. Gail was Vice President of the mapping products division of Vexcel Corporation, where he initiated Vexcel's 2006 acquisition by Microsoft.

Before joining Vexcel, Dr. Gail was Director of Earth Science Programs at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation where he was responsible for developing spaceborne instruments/missions for Earth science and meteorology.

The content of this profile was last updated 8 November 2012
This web page was last updated 4 April 2013