Barbara Brown

Job Duties

Lead RAP's forecast verification program; develop and apply appropriate verification methods for a variety of types of forecasts; oversee RAP forecast verification activities and other projects involving meteorological statistics.

Professional Interests

Forecast verification; value and use of weather and climate information; aviation weather forecasting; statistical forecasting methods; applications of statistics in the atmospheric and environmental sciences.

Education

B.S., Colorado State University, 1976, Statistics M.S., University of Virginia, 1979, Environmental Sciences M.S., Oregon State University, 1983, Statistics

Selected Publications

Murphy, A.H. and B.G. Brown, 1983: Forecast terminology: Composition and interpretation of public weather forecasts. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 64, 13-22.

Murphy, A.H. and B.G. Brown, 1984: A comparative evaluation of objective and subjective weather forecasts in the United States. Journal of Forecasting, 3, 369-393.

Brown, B.G., R.W. Katz and A.H. Murphy, 1984: Exploratory analysis of precipitation with implications for stochastic modeling. Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, 24, 57-67.

Brown, B.G., R.W. Katz and A.H. Murphy, 1984: Time series models to simulate and forecast wind speed and wind power. Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, 23, 1184-1195.

Murphy, A.H. and B.G. Brown, 1985: A comparative evaluation of objective and subjective weather forecasts in the United States. In Behavioral Decision Making, G. Wright, Editor. Plenum Publishing Corporation, 329-359.

Brown, B.G., R.W. Katz and A.H. Murphy, 1986: On the economic value of seasonal-precipitation forecasts: The fallowing/planting problem. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 67, 833-841.

Brown, B.G. and A.H. Murphy, 1987: Quantification of uncertainty in fire-weather forecasts: Some results of operational and experimental forecasting programs. Weather and Forecasting, 2, 190-205.

Brown, B.G., 1988: Climate variability and the Colorado River Compact: Implications for responding to climate change. In Societal Responses to Regional Climatic Change. M.H. Glantz, Editor. Boulder, Colorado,
Westview Press, 279-305. Brown, B.G. and A.H. Murphy, 1988: The economic value of weather forecasts in wildfire suppression mobilization decisions. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 18, 1641-1649.

Murphy, A.H., B.G. Brown and Y.-S. Chen, 1989: Diagnostic verification of temperature forecasts. Weather and Forecasting, 4, 485-501.

Brown, B.G. and R.W. Katz, 1991: Use of statistical methods in the search for teleconnections: Past, present, and future. In Teleconnections Linking Worldwide Climate Anomalies: Scientific Basis and Societal Impact. M.H. Glantz, R.W. Katz, and N. Nicholls, Editors, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 371-400.

Brown, B.G. and R.W. Katz, 1995: Regional analysis of temperature extremes: Spatial analog for climate change? Journal of Climate, 8, 108-119.

Brown, B.G. and A.H. Murphy, 1996: Improving forecasting performance by combining forecasts: The example of road-surface temperature forecasts. Meteorological Applications, 3, 257-265.

Brown, B.G., G. Thompson, R.T. Bruintjes, R. Bullock and T. Kane, 1997: Intercomparison of in-flight icing algorithms. Part II: Statistical verification results. Weather and Forecasting, 12, 890-914.

Ms. Brown earned a B.S. degree in statistics from Colorado State University, and then studied environmental science, with an emphasis on atmospheric science, at the University of Virginia, where she received an M.S. degree. Her research at the University of Virginia involved the statistical design and evaluation of weather modification experiments. For the following two years, she worked at the Institute for Atmospheric Sciences at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where shecontinued to work on statistical aspects of weather modification programs. Subsequently, she obtained an M.S. degree in statistics from Oregon State University. While at Oregon State, she was a research associate in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, where her work concerned applications of statistics to the atmospheric sciences and the development of approaches to evaluate the quality, use, and value of eather and climate information.

After leaving Oregon State University, Ms. Brown continued her work in the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for tmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. She subsequently obtained her current position as the lead of the verification group in the Research Applications Program at NCAR, where she is a Project Scientist. The verification group has primarily focused on applications to aviation weather forecasts, including forecasts of in-flight icing, turbulence, and convection. Ms. Brown is a member of the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Program In-flight Icing, Turbulence, Ceiling and Visibility, Convective Weather, Oceanic Weather, and Aviation Forecast and Quality Assessment Product Development Teams. She has developed verification approaches that are appropriate for aviation weather forecasts, has led efforts to improve and interpret the information available from verification studies, and has coordinated or helped to coordinate numerous intercomparisons of various types of forecasts. She also has contributed extensively to the development of methods used by the Real-Time Verification System at the Forecast Systems Laboratory. Ms. Brown has served as member and Chair of the AMS committee on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences and is a member of several working groups and committees on in-flight icing and forecast verification. She currently is associate editor for the journal Weather and Forecasting.

Ms. Brown lives in Boulder with her husband, Ed Tollerud, and their two teenage sons.