2013 OAR Employee of the Year Award

Rick Lumpkin and Mayra Pazos of PhOD won the 2013 OAR Employee of the Year Award.

The award was given to recognize the Global Drifter Program's federal employees, Rick Lumpkin and Mayra Pazos, for their efforts to improve the quality of the drifter data by developing a new methodology to evaluate when drifters have lost their drogues.  This reevaluation required manual examination of time series from over 14,000 drifters, to determine cases in which the drogue lost time was misdiagnosed, and to reassess those times.  The reevaluation was initiated in April 2012 and concluded in April 2013, and publicly-available metadata files containing drogue off dates were revised 16 times during that period to distribute the most recent results.