Carl Drews
Software Engineer III
WebmasterAtmospheric Chemistry Observations & Modeling
National Center for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, Colorado 80305-3000
Phone: (303) 497-1429
Fax: (303) 497-1400
E-Mail: drews
ucar.edu
Software Engineer III
Webmasterucar.edu
Contents: Curriculum Vitae, Creek, Interests.
Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, California.
Master of Science degree in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder;
Graduate Certificate in Oceanography.
Research paper "Detecting Climate Change in Canadian Ice Data" is posted at http://www.highestlake.com/canadice.html.
Research paper "Sandstorm Over Baghdad: The Dust Storm that Stalled the Coalition Invasion of Iraq".
Research paper "Separating the ACE Hurricane Index into Number, Intensity, and Duration".
Master's thesis: "Application of Storm Surge Modeling to Moses' Crossing of the Red Sea; and to Manila Bay, the Philippines". The thesis document is published by ProQuest, and is also available through the Chinook Library Catalog of the University of Colorado at Boulder. If those links don't work, you can search by Author for Drews in Theses and Dissertations. blog
2009 ATOC Summer Fellowship, University of Colorado.
"Marching Cubes Without Lookup Cases: Crawl the Edge Crossings Instead" Carl Drews (2022).
Published in Hu, W., Vanderwende, B., Mickelson, S., & Nusbaumer, J. (Eds.). (2022). Proceedings of the 2022 Improving Scientific Software Conference (No. NCAR/TN-574+PROC). doi:10.5065/98kd-b491 (page 19). See also Marching Cubes github repository of Python source code."A Modeling System Designed Around the User Interface", Carl Drews and Ron Laughery. 1985 Summer Computer Simulation Conference, July 1985, Chicago, Illinois.
"Development of Military Performance Models for the Assessment of Psychopharmacological Agent Impact", Carl Drews and Ron Laughery. Annual summary report for U.S. Army Research and Development Command, Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland, January 1986.
"Using TENA to Distribute Weather Data in Synthetic Environments"; by Carl Drews, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Dr. Elford Astling, U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, and James Morris, Keane Corporation. ITEA Conference, Las Cruces, New Mexico, December 12-15, 2005.
"bluefire Accomplishment Report", by Carl Drews, May 2010. This NCAR internal report describes the scientific results achieved by the use of CISL computing resources. The report focuses on the modeling improvements that result from higher grid resolution.
"Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta", by Carl Drews and Weiqing Han, PLoS ONE, 2010 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012481. This modeling study applies to the biblical Moses parting the Red Sea, as described in Exodus 14. link OpenSky blog For more information, please click on Parting the Red Sea.
"Could Wind Have Parted the Red Sea?", by Carl Drews, 2011. Weatherwise magazine, January/February 2011, pages 30-35 doi:10.1080/00431672.2011.536122.
Using Wind Setdown and Storm Surge on Lake Erie to Calibrate the Air-Sea Drag Coefficient, by Carl Drews, 2013. Published in PLoS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0072510 OpenSky
Drews, Carl, Thomas Galarneau, 2015: Directional analysis of the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy 2012, with applications to Charleston, New Orleans, and the Philippines. PLoS One, 10.1371/journal.pone.0122113.
Drews, Carl, 2015: Directional Storm Surge in Enclosed Seas: The Red Sea, the Adriatic, and Venice. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 3(2), 356-367; doi:10.3390/jmse3020356
Drews, Carl, 2015: Examining Exodus 14 with the Geosciences. Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin (NEASB) Volume 60, pages 1-15. To obtain a copy of this paper, please contact the Near East Archaeological Society.
"Using a Supercomputer to Part the Red Sea". International Conference "Exodus: Myth or Reality?", Rotary Club of Pinerolo, Province of Turin, Italy. November 12, 2010.
"Parting the Red Sea with Open Access and the Media". ACD Seminar, NCAR Earth System Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado. December 3, 2010.
"Publishing with Open Access and OpenSky". Fall 2010 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, California. December 16, 2010.
Storm Surge And Low-Lying Philippines Made A Deadly Combination on National Public Radio; November 11, 2013; reported by Christopher Joyce. I spoke about the storm surge from Typhoon Haiyan at Tacloban City on Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.
There is an irrigation ditch to the east of UCAR's Foothills Lab named "Boulder and Whiterock Ditch." I am measuring the water level in this creek every day at lunchtime. I measure from the footbridge at 40 degrees 02.212 minutes North, 105 degrees 14.438 minutes West. The creek is human-controlled for irrigation purposes, but it does react to heavy precipitation (note the spike of 34 cm on March 5, 2004). It's unlikely that I can extract any useful climate information from these controlled water levels, so the purpose of this project is more to investigate the issues of human data collection. The photo below shows me taking the measurement at the bridge:
If I ever find myself someday asking Andean villagers to measure some glacial-fed river somewhere, at least I'll know what they can expect! Here are some of the leassons learned so far:
The project is also a nice introduction to data collection, graphing, and display over the Internet. I created the graph above with IDL and used a simple Linux shell script to transfer it to the web server.
Boulder - Whiterock Ditch begins at Broadway and Canyon in Boulder as a spur canal off Boulder Creek. One can go inner-tubing from there all the way to Mitchell Lane during high water, but the low bridges are dangerous. The canal runs by Hayden Lake, but does not normally drain into the lake unless a certain gate is open. Boulder and Whiterock Ditch eventually runs through Gunbarrel and Niwot all the way out to Panama Reservoir Number 1.
In 2010 a local real estate appraiser kindly sent me some additional information about the Boulder and Whiterock Ditch system and its associated water rights. He included a ditch map of Boulder County.
Here are plots of creek levels from 2004 - 2009:
During 2002-2004 I identified and named the highest lake in the United States: Pacific Tarn at 13,420 feet near Breckenridge, Colorado. You can read all about it at highestlake.com.
The picture below shows me standing on the summit of Pacific Peak at
dawn on July 14, 2002 during the CHAOS scientific expedition to the
lake. Pacific Tarn and Quandary Peak are behind me.
I maintain a web page on hurricane metrics with an emphasis on separating the ACE index into its components. I contribute to a personal blog, funmurphys.com, that sometimes contains posts of scientific interest. Funmurphys: The Blog is independent of and not endorsed by NCAR.
Last update: January 11, 2023.