Gary Wick receives NOAA OAR Employee of the Year Award for Leadership

Congratulations to ESRL Physical Sciences Laboratory physicist, Dr. Gary Wick, who has been named recipient of the 2017 NOAA OAR Employee of the Year Award "for outstanding leadership related to the NOAA Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) program." This award recognizes NOAA OAR employees who have made outstanding contributions to promote excellence in the operations or programs of NOAA Research. The award will be presented at a ceremony on November 15 in Silver Spring, MD.

Serving as SHOUT Project Scientist from 2014 through its completion this year, Wick was responsible for helping to conduct three field deployments with the Global Hawk Unmanned Aircraft System and coordinating impact studies utilizing the data. One of his primary tasks was leading the preparation of the final report documenting the results of the impact studies conducted by all the groups involved in SHOUT.

Wick has worked at NOAA for the past 17 years, and was a CIRES researcher for the three years prior to that. His background is in satellite-based remote sensing of sea surface temperature and physical processes at the air-sea interface. With NOAA, Wick's work has ranged from remote sensing of the ocean surface to remote sensing of atmospheric moisture and recently to evaluating the scientific utility of unmanned aircraft.

Posted: November 6, 2017