Michael C. Morgan, Ph.D., has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, and he will also serve as deputy NOAA administrator. In this role, Morgan will be responsible for providing agency-wide direction with regard to weather, water, climate, and ocean observations, including in situ instruments and satellites, and the process of converting observations to predictions for environmental threats.

“Dr. Morgan will be an invaluable addition to the Department and to our NOAA leadership team,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo. “His decades of world-renowned atmospheric and oceanic scientific expertise and dedicated service to the community make him ideally qualified to help guide NOAA’s lifesaving observation and prediction activities.”

Morgan brings over 25 years of demonstrated scientific leadership to this position. He most recently served as a professor and associate department chair in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his research was focused on the analysis, diagnosis, prediction, and predictability of mid-latitude and tropical weather systems.

“I am excited to welcome Dr. Morgan to NOAA, and look forward to working with him to advance NOAA’s mission,”  said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “His expertise will be  especially critical as climate change necessitates an even  greater reliance on NOAA’s world-class observations and predictions to support sustainable economic growth, protect property, and save lives.”    

“I look forward to working with the exceptional team at  NOAA to advance our nation’s earth system prediction capabilities, ensure that our workforce reflects the diversity of our country and the communities we serve, and develop tools so that our authoritative weather and climate data can be used even more effectively,” said Morgan. “We know that communities across the country rely on NOAA data products as they develop and execute plans to improve preparedness for extreme weather and environmental change.”

In addition to his roles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Morgan recently served on the World Meteorological Organization World Weather Research Programme’s Scientific Steering Committee and as member of the board of directors of the American Institute of Physics and as chair of their Public Policy Advisory Committee. He also recently completed two terms on the Board of Trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Morgan has previously served as the division director for the Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences at the National Science Foundation, and as an AMS/UCAR Congressional Science Fellow, working in the office of U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin (MD) as a senior legislative fellow on energy and environmental issues.

Morgan is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), an organization with which he has been involved for decades. Specifically, he has served the AMS community as a Councilor, and as a member of a number of committees including the Committee on Ethics, Nominating Committee, Planning Commission, Board on Women and Minorities and as a member the Scientific and Technological Activities Commission for Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics.

Morgan was born in Northampton, Massachusetts and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Morgan earned his S.B. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Source: NOAA Communications