Scott Ellis

Scott came to NCAR in 1997 as an associate scientist with a Master of Science degree from the University of Oklahoma. While working at NCAR, Scott received his PhD. from Colorado University in 2010. The topic was dual-wavelength radar retrievals of humidity and liquid water content. In his time at EOL (formerly known as ATD) Scott has supported 19 field campaigns. Scott enjoys his role supporting the NSF community observation needs and particularly working with students in field programs and data analysis.

Scott is currently on the AMS Radar Meteorology STAC committee and is an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. 

Scott's recent research interests focus on radar data quality and retrievals of physical quantities from radar data such as microphysical characteristics. He worked as an undergraduate on the problem of single Doppler 3D velocity retrievals and his Master of Science thesis investigated radar data assimilation into meso-scale models.

Scott has been on the NCAR NEXRAD data quality team since 1997. This team has developed several algorithms that mitigate ground clutter contamination and range/velocity ambiguities. These algorithms have been implemented on the National Weather Service NEXRAD operational radar network. Scott also worked to help develop an absolute calibration of reflectivity using the dual-polarimetric self-consistency principle. Scott has experience with dual-polarimetric rainfall estimation and drop size distribution retrievals and their verification. He has also worked with dual-polarimetric radar microphysical retrievals. He developed new techniques to retrieve environmental humidity and total liquid water content from dual-wavelength S-band and Ka-band radar data. Scott also recently developed a new X-band rainfall attenuation correction method. He is also currently working to detect aircraft icing hazard with dual-polarimetric radars. Scott is most recently working with the development team of the HIAPER Cloud Radar, which is a W-band airborne, dual-polarization, research Doppler radar.