The meeting was held at Jackson State University. The guest speaker was Jay Grymes, climate operations manager for the Southern Region Center (SRCC) at Louisiana State University and state climatologist for Louisiana.
Meeting Minutes
The third regular meeting of the chapter was held on Wednesday, 28 January 1998 on the campus of Jackson State University. Chapter President Paul Croft called the meeting to order with 13 members present.
The brief business meeting included a unanimous vote to establish the Susan S. Oakley Public Service Award to be presented by the Jackson chapter membership semiannually for outstanding public service in the field of meteorology or a related field. The award was named for Susan S. Oakley, who was a teacher in antebellum Jackson, whose students took and recorded the first local weather observations from June 1849 to December 1855. A Jackson chapter local scholarship award proposal was tabled pending further information.
Brad Regan, lead forecaster at the NWS Jackson, volunteered and was unanimously approved to fill the vacant treasurer’s office.
Rusty Pfost, chapter secretary, gave a brief report on the local chapter poster at the 78th AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. The poster consisted of brief summaries of four articles by chapter members in the southern region special issue of Weather and Forecasting, as well as a concise display about the recent 14 December surprise snowstorm in central Mississippi.
Croft called the membership’s attention to the upcoming Mississippi Science and Engineering Fair for Region II, to be held 18-19 March 1998 at Jackson State. Local chapter members were urged to volunteer to be judges. He also reported that the Jackson chapter is one of a few national sites chosen to review candidates for the AMS Minority Scholarships, and that one application had already been received.
Croft then introduced Jay Grymes as the speaker for the meeting. Grymes is the climate operations manager for the Southern Region Center (SRCC) at Louisiana State University (LSU) and also the state climatologist for Louisiana. Grymes presented information on the effect of El Niño so far this winter on the weather of the SRCC area. He noted that so far temperatures and rainfall have both been above normal (some of SRCCs findings are on the SRCC Web site at http://www.src.lsu.edu). Grymes then gave a summary of the SRCC mission and organizational structure, information services, costs, publications, and research areas. According to Grymes, the SRCC has available NWS products in the service area for the last four years, local severe weather reports and national severe weather summaries, historical climate data from primary and cooperative stations in the service area, and soon will have some WSR-88D data, profiler data, and upper air archives.
Minutes submitted by Rusty Pfost.
Central Mississippi Chapter of the NWA and AMS 