Lidia Cucurull

Dr. Lidia Cucurull received her PhD in Physics on the Use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals in Numerical Weather Prediction from the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2001. Since then, she has worked at UCAR, NASA, and NOAA. She has won several national awards in recognition of her work, including the UCAR Outstanding Scientific and Technology Advancement Award (2007) and the NOAA David Johnson Award (2011), and she became a “Fellow” of the American Meteorological Society in 2016. She currently serves as the Deputy Director and Chief Scientist of NOAA’s Quantitative Observing System Assessment Program (QOSAP) and the Chief of the QOSAP/AOML-Observing Systems Analysis (OSA) Group. She leads the evaluation of research techniques, including developing algorithms for deriving atmospheric, oceanic and/or land measurements from in situ sensors, aircraft platforms, and satellite remote sensing. She provides scientific leadership to quantitatively evaluate the complementarity of different observing systems through Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) and Observing System Experiments (OSEs) to help NOAA management prioritize mission designs in a cost-effective way. Specifically, Lidia has planned and led numerous project management efforts, including developing/improving the assimilation of GNSS-RO observations in NOAA’s models and conducting observing systems sensitivity experiments with UAS, GNSS-RO, ground-based GNSS, GNSS-R, GEO-HSS, MW/IR instruments on a variety of platforms, 3D winds from space, and other weather satellite data. Lidia has published over forty-five scientific papers of original research in peer-reviewed journals, including data quality evaluation, observing system analysis and sensitivity experiments. Overall, Lidia has 25 years of experience working with data assimilation and GNSS, including both ground-based and space-based applications of the technique and she is the NOAA/OAR Principal Investigator for GNSS-Radio Occultation observations and leads the GNSS-RO data assimilation efforts at NOAA. Finally, she is a core member of the NESDIS Systems performance Assessment Team (SAT), member of the GEO-XO Requirements Working Group, an advisor of the NOAA Observing Systems Committee (OSC), an OAR representative of the NESDIS Space Weather FY23-28 SIP Working Group, and the NOAA Lead for Joint Studies of Observation Impacts for Applications of the NOAA-NASA Earth System Modeling Working Group.