James Stalker, an AMS Member, is the Cofounder, President, and CEO of Regional Earth System Predictability Research, Inc. in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Dr. Stalker is an active participant in the North American wind energy industry. His businesses have developed fast, cost-effective, and accurate wind energy assessment and forecasting methodologies based on complex physics-based atmospheric models, parallel computer clusters, and high-resolution meteorological information. He has a PhD degree (1997) in atmospheric sciences, with emphasis in computational fluid dynamical simulations of atmospheric phenomena, from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He also has a master's degree in atmospheric sciences (1995, UAH), a master's degree in mechanical engineering (1992, UAH) and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering (1986, JNTU College of Engineering, India). Dr. Stalker, a U.S. citizen, joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1997 as a postdoctoral fellow, became a technical staff member in 1999, and held that position until 2003. While at LANL, he engaged in several research efforts to enhance understanding of mountain precipitation processes, the North American Monsoon, air pollution in metropolitan cities in stable and convective atmospheric boundary layer conditions, dispersion behavior of toxic material in urban settings, etc. As part of his dissertation research, Dr. Stalker studied thunderstorm formation and dissipation processes using high-resolution numerical atmospheric models. He determined an optimal non-dimensional convective cell separation distance for isolated cells to merge. Such cell mergers tend to produce augmented precipitation compared to the total precipitation from the two individual cells without the presence of the cell merger process. In addition to augmented precipitation, merged cells would likely produce increased severe effects of thunderstorms such as stronger surface wind, flash flooding, increased lightning activity, etc.