Researcher get technical contributions award

UW–Madison’s Thomas Whittaker, a meteorologist and software designer in the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, received the Russell L. DeSouza Award at the 2003 annual conference of the American Meteorological Society.

Whittaker is recognized for his contributions to the Unidata program, a community of education and research institutions that share data, as well as the tools and resources to access, visualize and use data. CIMSS and its parent organization, the Space Science and Engineering Center, have collaborated with Unidata by providing expertise, software and data for more than 20 years.

An SSEC employee since the 1970s, Whittaker has worked with the Unidata user community since the program’s beginning in 1983. He has also developed VISITview, a teletraining tool used by the National Weather Service to train all forecasters to more efficiently use satellite data, and created AniS, an adaptable Java applet used around the world, including in all weather service radar Web sites.