Serving in leadership roles in AMS has been both rewarding and humbling, and I intend to continue serving in any way I can. As we approach the 100-year anniversary of AMS, our enterprise is facing both challenges and opportunities like we have never seen before. My particular areas of passion and focus are in three key areas: leveraging commercial capabilities and technologies, intersections between weather and social sciences, and bipartisan communication.

The rapid and accelerating pace of technology advancement is opening the door to new ways of monitoring and forecasting the weather. In space, miniaturization has enabled constellations of SmallSats and CubeSats to reach a level of quality that meets many key observational needs. On the ground, big data analytics, machine learning, automation, and the Internet of Things are giving us entirely new ways to obtain, process, and understand these observations. In concert, we must be able to maintain data integrity in an increasingly vulnerable cyberspace.

The tremendous and continual advances in weather forecasting have outpaced our ability to understand how the public responds to those forecasts. We need to work closely with social scientists to understand how we can best leverage social media and other trends and tools, to better communicate watches and warnings in a way that saves the maximum possible number of lives during extreme events.

Finally, we also need to improve communication in the dialogue between our community, policy-makers, and the general public. We must find common ground to strip away the partisan biases that too often surround discussion of weather and especially climate. This is vital for establishing the resilience to adapt to our changing Earth.

Shawn Miller

Shawn Miller is an engineering fellow and certified architect with Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS). He is currently the technical director for the Navigation and Environmental Solutions (NES) mission area within IIS. In this role, he works across the company and with multiple government customers to define future weather capability needs and identify the associated enabling technologies. His portfolio of programs includes the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground System (CGS), the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), the Joint Environmental Toolkit (JET), the Earth Observing System Mission Operations Center (EMOS), and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) ground system. Prior to his current position, he was the chief architect on the JPSS CGS, which has been in operations with the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) since October 2011. He has been working in various aspects of satellite remote sensing for 26 years.

Miller obtained a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland, College Park. He joined Raytheon in October 1997, where he has held numerous leadership roles, including science algorithm development and the definition of the spectral bands on the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), now flying on S-NPP; definition of key operational requirements for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R series (GOES-R) program; and technical direction of the JPSS Interface Data Processor Segment (IDPS), which now delivers terabytes per day of satellite data products to multiple operational users.

Outside of Raytheon, Miller has annually delivered a remote sensing seminar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he also served as adjunct faculty in 2008. He has been a member of AMS since 1996. Within AMS, he participated in the AMS Summer Policy Colloquium in 2007, and joined the AMS Board on Enterprise Economic Development (BEED) in 2010 and the AMS Committee on Environmental Security in 2011. From 2014 to 2017, he was the chair of BEED, leading the planning and execution of the annual AMS Washington Forum (AWF), a flagship AMS event.