Roman Kowch Email & Phone Number

Norfolk, Virginia, United States

Norfolk, Virginia Area

• Subject Matter Expert under the Science, Technology and Research Support Services (STARSS) contract specializing in atmospheric dynamics, satellite and modeled data processing, parallel programming and visualization.
• Developed extensive visualization tools independently for combining remote sensing data with disparate geometries and resolutions, using Google Earth and ParaView as rendering engines, and applying original programming.
• Engineered 3-D displays of satellite data, using tool prototypes above, to support analyses of satellite output algorithms.
• Currently archiving and documenting the designed visualization tools under a version-control system for access and modification by other colleagues.
• Currently supporting the 2019 NASA Camp2Ex field mission by tailoring visualization products to aid flight planning and assess cloud/aerosol conditions. Products include predicted satellite tracks/swaths necessary for.
• Wrote high-level Matlab functions and constructed GUI to run pre-developed lidar simulation code.

Master's Candidate In Atmospheric Science (Cambridge, MA)

• Extracted and analyzed thermodynamic equilibration signals in European large-scale atmospheric blocking episodes to understand underlying physics (B.S. thesis).
• Inspected archived tropical cyclone tracks for diurnal signals, and assessed those signals’ significance in short-term intensity forecasting using statistical methods (M.S. thesis).
• Presented oral defense for both projects to faculty and other department members.

Great Lakes Env. Research Lab (Ann Arbor, MI)

• Analyzed trends in basin runoff, atmospheric water budget, and precipitation recycling across the Great Lakes region through summer fellowship (2010) and NOAA Hollings internship (2011).
• Extensive processing of scientific datasets and technical additions to computer code, involving physical equations and numerical methods. Wrote inline documentation and integrated numerical solvers into lab's regional.
• Wrote code in Fortran 90, NCAR Command Language (NCL), and Unix / Linux shell scripts. Visualized output data using NCL scripts, and documented findings through report and poster presentation.
• Lectured results to lab colleagues of the Cooperative Institute for Limnology and Ecosystems Research and at NOAA Hollings conference (Silver Spring, MD).

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (Cambridge, MA)

• Designed engaging 3D visualizations of large-scale atmospheric phenomena from NetCDF and GRIB with the Unidata Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) in MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).
• Wrote Jython scripts in Linux to plot atmospheric reanalysis data from user-friendly interface, for use in departmental lab curriculum and broader cloud-computing initiative at MIT.
• Applied data from numerical weather prediction model output, such as NOAA GFS, and from local NetCDF climatology files.
• Conferred with Unidata software developers over results at 2012 workshop (Boulder, CO).

Great Lakes Env. Research Lab (Ann Arbor, MI)

• Tasks noted above.

(2013) Master Of Science (Ms), Atmospheric Science

Activities and Societies: • Student forecaster in WxChallenge Collegiate Weather Forecasting Competition (2008-13) • Meteorologist for MIT.

(2012) Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Earth, Atmospheric, And Planetary Sciences

(2012) Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Physics