Welcome to Dr. Sarah Ruth, who has recently joined RAL as a Senior Research Associate to work on the interpretation of UARS data; to Dr. Bryan Lawrence, who has joined RAL as an 'Atlas Fellow', which means he spends half of his time at RAL and half time at Oxford, forming stronger links between the two UGAMP groups; and to Dr. Richard Kennaugh, who joins RAL in July as a Senior Research Associate to work on the modelling of interannual variability (funded under UGAMP Special Topic 2).
As a result of the recent Research Council changes, the UGAMP group at RAL has now 'joined the fold' and comes under NERC. This is also true of the Geophysical Data Facility (GDF), so the GDF can now work very much more closely with the NERC programs, including UGAMP. GDF has, as a result of the change, lost its remit to handle solar terrestrial physics data and will become much more involved in tropospheric data than previously. To reflect the changed remit, the name of the data centre has been changed to the NERC British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC). Over the next few months, we will also be working on a revamped system based on unix - so watch out for dramatic changes!
Lesley Gray