Dr. Ginis is actively involved in both the U.S. and international tropical cyclone research and forecast communities. His ground-breaking work in developing a coupled hurricane-ocean interaction model has led to significant improvement in hurricane forecasting. The National Weather Service embraced this model, making it an official operational hurricane model for the National Hurricane Center in 2001.

Dr. Richard Yablonsky is a research meteorologist and oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. In addition to his work modeling the interaction between hurricanes and the ocean, every spring Dr. Yablonsky chases tornadoes. He has been instrumental in the development of scientific content for hurricanescience.org.

Todd Kimberlain is a hurricane specialist at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. Kimberlain joined the National Hurricane Center in 2008 as a forecaster in the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch but has been doing forecast work with hurricanes since his days as a high school intern at the National Hurricane Center. Kimberlain is leading an effort to re- analyze tropical cyclones in the eastern Pacific basin.

Dr. Mark DeMaria has served as the Chief of NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch since 1998. He had previously worked as a research meteorologist at the OAR Hurricane Research Division and as the Chief of the Technical Support Branch of the NCEP Tropical Prediction Center. Dr. DeMaria’s work has been focused on research and development related to tropical cyclone forecasting, mesoscale meteorology and numerical weather prediction.