Education

Joshua Wurman's father is noted architect and founder of the TED conferences, Richard Saul Wurman. He attended Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia. He earned a S.B. in physics and interdisciplinary science in 1982, a S.M. in meteorology in 1982, and a Sc.D. in meteorology in 1991, all from MIT. His masters thesis was The Long Range Dispersion of Radioactive Particulates and his doctoral dissertation was Forcing Mechanisms of Thunderstorm Downdrafts. He moved to Boulder, Colorado to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and later to Norman, Oklahoma where he was a tenured faculty member at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He founded the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR) in 1998, which operates the Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radars. Wurman returned to Boulder in 2001.

Research

Wurman is particularly interested in researching tornadogenesis and amassing sufficient datasets of tornado structure and dynamics observations for tornado climatology study. He is also the discoverer of sub-kilometer hurricane boundary layer rolls, and wrote the pioneering papers on mapping tornado winds, multiple vortices, and other tornado-related phenomena.

Joshua Wurman participated in both the VORTEX projects, doing early deployments of the first scraped together DOW radars for VORTEX1 and served on the steering committee and was a principal investigator (PI) for VORTEX2, the field research phase of which occurred from 2009-2010.^[1] Wurman's team observed the top two fastest wind events and two contenders for the largest tornado circulations. He leads the ROTATE (Radar Observations of Tornadoes And Thunderstorms Experiment) tornado observational project^[2] every spring and hurricane intercepts in the fall. A current major project of his is studying lake-effect snow in the OWLeS.

Dr. Wurman has authored and co-authored many scientific publications relating to hurricane and tornado dynamics and weather radar technology including two articles in Science,^[3][4] articles in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Monthly Weather Review, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Weather and Forecasting, and others. He was lead author of a controversial article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society analyzing the potential impacts of a major tornado passing through urban areas.

A Doppler On Wheels chasing a tornado near Attica, Kansas

Radar innovations

Wurman and his team developed the DOW radars, a new concept of mobile radar, used to observe tornadoes, tropical cyclones, wildfires,^[5] winter storms, and other phenomena from close range. He built the first DOW in 1995 from spare parts from NCAR and other facilities and as of March 2014 has built eight DOW units.^[6] The success of the DOWs led to a revolution of mobile radars in severe storms and other meteorological field research.

Furthermore, they developed meteorological bistatic radar multiple-Doppler networks, and the Rapid-Scan DOW, and holds about several patents related to bistatic and DOW technology.^[7] He founded BINET Inc., manufacturer of Bistatic Networks, in 1995.

National profile

He manages the DOW radar network which is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Lower Atmospheric Observing Facility. His scientific work and DOW projects have been sponsored by NSF, as well as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Forest Service (USFS), the United States Department of Energy (DOE), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and other agencies of the U.S. government, as well as by The Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic Society, among others.

Wurman is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty, a collection of the most influential scientists and engineers in the United States that are dedicated to reinvigorating the interest of young people in science and engineering.^[8]