Dr. Greg Forbes is a very familiar face on The Weather Channel when severe weather breaks out. Dr. Forbes was a student of the late Dr. Ted Fujita, and his PhD thesis was entitled: “Three scales of motions associated with Tornadoes”. Dr. Forbes brings 30+ years of tornado research and recently was chair of the F-Scale Symposium in 2004.

A native of San Diego, Steve grew up in southern California. He attended the University of Hawaii on a track scholarship, where he ran the 800 meters. Between track meets and surfing sessions, Steve obtained a B.S., and a M.S., culminating in a Ph.D. in Meteorology in 1981.

Steve's expertise is in Tropical and Marine Meteorology. He has participated in more than 50 national and international conferences and provided World Meteorological Organization training courses in marine meteorology, tropical meteorology and ocean wave forecasting. Each spring Steve is a guest speaker at many hurricane preparedness conferences from Texas to New York.

Prior to joining The Weather Channel in April 1998, Steve managed the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch of the Tropical Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center.

He has worked directly for private weather companies and traveled around the world forecasting weather in various tropical locales. Steve has also been a private consultant forecasting ocean waves for numerous surfing beaches. Familiar with on-camera assignments, Steve worked on-air for a station in Ventura County, California.

Among his many interesting jobs, Steve has been a research scientist for the U.S. Navy, for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) at Princeton University, and for the University of California at Los Angeles(UCLA). He has also been a professor of meteorology at Texas A&M University, where he is still an adjunct faculty member, and at the University of Hawaii where he remains involved with the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR). Steve has also worked for the National Weather Service South Region Scientific Services Division, where he trained NWS meteorologists. Steve routinely reviews scientific papers related to tropical and marine weather submitted for publication in American Meteorological Society and other international journals.

Steve is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society; he has published more than 20 papers in scientific journals, and written more than 40 technical reports and articles for the National Weather Service and for the Navy. Currently Steve is seen during "hurricane season" on Tropical Updates at :50 past the hour. In his spare time he develops various models and continuously improves them; they provide many of the forecasts of hurricane impacts on land you see on The Weather Channel cable network and weather.com.

Jack Beven, Ph.D., is a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Dr. Beven received his Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Louisiana State University (1984), and his Master's Degree and Doctorate in Meteorology from Florida State University (1988, 1994).

Dr. Beven began his career with the National Hurricane Center in 1988 as a student intern. He participated in the Tropical Cyclone Motion-90 experiment in 1990, studying typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean, and took part in the TRACE-A atmospheric chemistry experiment in 1992. He advanced to a full-time position at NHC in 1993 as a map analyst, and was promoted to a marine and aviation forecaster in 1994.

Dr. Beven became a hurricane specialist in 1999. The position involves the issuance of track, intensity, and wind radii forecasts as well as associated watches and warnings for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific oceans.

Dr. Beven is the lead author of the Tropical Prediction Center (TPC) column in the Mariners Weather Log, and is a TPC trainer of the Dvorak technique for estimating the intensity of tropical cyclones from satellite
imagery. He is an instructor at the Tropical Prediction Center workshops for U.S. emergency managers and worldwide meteorologists. In addition, he is a member of the supervisory committee for the hurricane tracks re-analysis project.

Dr. Beven is a presenter and participant in a number of meteorological meetings, including several American Meteorological Society Conferences on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, NOAA Hurricane Conferences, and Interdepartmental Hurricane Conferences, as well as various meetings, including the National Hurricane Conference and Florida Governor’s Conference.
March

Dr. Joshua Wurman grew up in Pennsylvania, received his BS, MS, and ScD's from MIT then moved to NCAR to develop bistatic radar networks. He moved to OU and developed the DOW mobile radars, and began to study tornadoes, hurricanes, fires and other phenomena from close up in order to see details that were not otherwise resolvable.

The DOWs can see 4D details with literally tens-of-thousands of times the resolution of traditional radars. Wurman and the DOWs created the first maps of tornado winds, the first mapping of multiple vortices, the first dual-Doppler vector wind retrievals in tornadoes, measured the highest ever tornadic winds, conducted the only radar-data-based calibration of the Fujita scale, and discovered sub-kilometer-scale hurricane boundary layer rolls.

Wurman leads the ROTATE tornado research program, which has obtained data in over 100 tornadoes and dual-Doppler data in about a dozen. These data are being used by Wurman and his collaborators to study tornadogenesis, tornado structure and low level tornadic winds.

The DOWs have intercepted nine hurricane eyes, obtaining dual-Doppler data in five, and most recently intercepted the eye of Rita as it came ashore near Port Arthur , Texas . Wurman and the DOWs have participated in far flung projects, from alpine studies in Switzerland (MAP) to turbulence studies in Alaska (JAWS), and many projects in between including VORTEX, FLATLAND/LIFT, IPEX, CALJET, and IHOP.

Tim Marshall needs no introduction. Tim has been chasing for 30 years, and is current owner of the Stormtrack.com website. If you never heard Tim speak before, you are in for a real treat. His presentations always have people laughing aloud most of the time. A licensed Professional Engineer for HAAG Engineering, Tim is an expert in Building Damage Assessment from all types of disasters - natural and man-made. He has wonderful insight to his passion which shows when he talks!

Jon Davies is a private meteorologist now living in the Kansas City area, where he recently moved from Wichita, Kansas. He focuses on practical operational research concerning severe weather and tornado forecasting. Jon graduated from the University of Kansas in 1980, and has worked as a broadcast meteorologist and forecaster for several television stations and private weather consulting firms. He also worked at the Weather Channel in the 1980’s.

Jon has published several papers in professional meteorological publications. His more notable work has focused on wind shear and instability combinations associated with significant tornadoes, as well as nonsupercell tornado settings and tornadoes near midlevel cold core lows. Jon recently wrote a book about tornadoes and storm chasing for middle school kids, “Storm Chasers! On the Trail of Twisters”.

Jon’s interest in severe weather began while he was growing up in Pratt, Kansas, where he witnessed his first tornado at age 9. He continues to enjoy storm chasing and storm spotting as a serious hobby and educational activity.

Howard (Howie “Cb”) B. Bluestein, a native of Boston, MA, is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor of Meteorology at the School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma (OU), Norman. He earned an S.B. and S. M. in electrical engineering in 1971 and 1972 and an S. M. and Ph. D. in meteorology in 1972 and 1976 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been a professor at OU since 1976; he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in synoptic meteorology and graduate courses in mesoscale meteorology and in convection. In 2004 he received the Teaching Excellence Award from the AMS. From 2000 – 2004 he was a Samuel Roberts Noble Presidential Professor. He has also been a long-term scientific visitor in the Mesoscale Microscale Meteorology Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, an instructor at COMET (Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education, and Training) in Boulder, CO, a scientific visitor at the Hurricane Research Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in Miami, FL, and the Houghton Lecturer at MIT.

Bluestein’s research interests include synoptic and mesoscale meteorology, severe convective storms and tornadoes, and tropical cyclones. Having participated in severe-storm intercept projects since 1977, he most recently has been using mobile W- and X-band Doppler radars to study tornadoes and severe storms. He is the author of Synoptic-Dynamic Meteorology in Midlatitudes, Vols. I and II (Oxford Univ. Press, 1992 and 1993) and of Tornado Alley (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), for which he received the AMS 2001 Louis J. Battan’s Author’s award. He is currently working on a book on clouds for Yale Univ. Press. He is also the author or coauthor of 88 refereed journal publications and 15 refereed book chapters. His photographs, which have been published worldwide, have been reproduced on the cover of Time magazine and in publications such as Scientific American, Le Figaro Magazine, Geo (Germany and France), Focus (Italy), and Weatherwise. He has appeared on television on NOVA, special programs on the BBC, Discovery Channel, the Weather Channel, the History Channel, and the Learning Channel, and in the IMAX movie Stormchasers.

He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and has served as chair of UCAR’s (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) Scientific Programs Evaluation Committee, the National Science Foundation Observing Facilities Advising Panel (OFAP), and the AMS Committee on Severe Local Storms. He has also served on the National Research Council (NRC) Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC) and on the NRC Committee on Weather Radar Technology Beyond NEXRAD (Next Generation Radar), and as an associate editor of the AMS peer-reviewed scientific journal Monthly Weather Review. He currently is the chair of OFAP for a second term, serves on the AMS Committee on Radar Meteorology and on the NAS/NRC Committee on Strategic Guidance for NSF’s Support of the Atmospheric Sciences. He is also one of two co-editors of the Sanders Symposium Monograph to be published by the AMS.