VITA Mark D. Powell is an atmospheric scientist for the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami, Florida. He began his NOAA career in 1978 with the National Hurricane Research Laboratory, which was renamed HRD and absorbed into AOML in 1982. He is now stationed at the Florida State University Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) in Tallahassee Florida. COAPS is a NOAA Applied Research Center. He has been active in microscale and mesoscale studies, concentrating on the analysis of hurricane surface wind fields, air-sea interaction in extreme winds, new metrics for hurricane destructive potential, boundary layer wind structure in landfalling hurricanes, hurricane rainband boundary layer dynamics, and development of standards for the measurement, analysis, and archival of hurricane surface wind fields. He is currently leading a project on real-time surface wind analysis, providing research wind field products to a variety of users including the National Hurricane Center and storm surge-, wave-, risk-, and ecosystem modelers. These products are available to the public on the HRD web site and have become the standard to which risk models and new wind measurement systems are compared. He is also Meteorology Team Leader for the Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model. He has flown into 13 hurricanes and served as lead project scientist on NOAA P3 hurricane research flights, the Genesis of Atlantic Lows Experiment (GALE) in 1986, and the Tropical Experiment in Mexico (TEXMEX) in 1991. He received his Bachelor of Science from The Florida State University in 1975, his Master of Science from Penn State in 1978, the Ph.D. from Florida State in 1988, and the Certified Consulting Meteorologist designation from the American Meteorological Society in 1990. He has chaired or served several committees including: Chairman of the Research Committee of the 1990 Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference, Meteorologist for the National Research Council Disaster Study Team on Hurricane Hugo's landfall in the mainland U.S., Chairman of the Meteorology Subcommittee for the American Society of Civil Engineers Task Committee on Wind Damage Investigation, the U.S.-Japan Natural Disaster Task Committee on Wind hazards, the FEMA HAZUS Wind Committee, the U. S. Weather Research Project's Prospectus Development Teams for Hurricanes and for Coastal Meteorology, and the National Research Council's Committee to review the need for a large-scale test facility for research on the effects of extreme winds on structures. He was the scientific operations officer for NOAA's Marine Olympic Weather Support Team in Savannah, Ga. for the 1996 Summer Olympic Game and also served the U.S. Olympic Committee as team meteorologist for the U. S. Sailing Team at the 1991 Pan American Games. He has served on the board of the American Association for Wind Engineering, and is a member of the American Meteorological Society, and the American Geophysical Union. In 1992 he was awarded the Department of Commerce Gold Medal (a group award presented for performance during Hurricane Andrew). For performance during and following Hurricane Katrina he was awarded Department of Commerce Bronze medals (in 2007 and 2008) and an award for Patriotic Civilian Service as a member of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force. His H*Wind project development team won the "Best JAVA Implementation" and ÒBest Technology TransferÓ awards from the NOAA Tech Conference in 2000 and 2002. He has served as principal investigator on numerous competitive research projects funded by government agencies and corporate entities including the Coastal Ocean Program, Everglades Restoration, High Performance Computing and Communications Program, National Institute for Science and Technology, National Institute for Building Sciences, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, U. S. Weather Research Program, Joint Hurricane Test Bed, and the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. In 2006 he was ranked by Thomas as # 10 author in the world for cited research on tropical storms from 1996-2006. He has published in several journals including Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Monthly Weather Review, Weather and Forecasting, Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Journal of Physical Oceanography, and Shore and Beach.