JISAO's Kimberly Bahl selected by NOAA Fisheries as NOAA Team Member of the Month - January 2008

The NOAA Fisheries Service is pleased to announce Ms. Kimberly Bahl, of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) at the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, as the NOAA Team Member of the Month for January 2008. The NOAA Team Member of the Month Award pays tribute to a non-NOAA employee, to give credit to the outstanding people who make NOAA programs a success but are not actually Federal employees.

A JISAO Fellow with the AFSC since July 2000, Kimberly began her work here with one of NOAA's original matrix programs, the Fisheries Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (FOCI), assisting in creating/ maintaining the North Pacific Metadata database. This database facilitates the ability of researchers, managers, students, fishermen and the public to understand the functioning of the complex ecosystems of the North Pacific Ocean, its marginal seas and coastal areas.

Under her oversight, the database has received support from the NOAA Environmental Services Data and Information Management Program, the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the North Pacific Research Board, the North Pacific Marine Research Program, and the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES).

Ms. Bahl and Dr. Bernard Megrey of the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and Mr. S. Allen Macklin of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory are leading an effort to establish Internet search and delivery of the joint catalogs of marine ecosystem data held by the United States, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia Oceanographic Data Centers.

This metadata "federation" of the member countries of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) is hosted by the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Clearinghouse of the Federal Geographic Data Committee. The initial nodes of the federation are NOAA's North Pacific Ecosystem Metadata database and Korea’s Oceanographic Data Center. These nodes are identified in the Clearinghouse, respectively, as "PICES - NOAA NPEM" and "PICES - KODC".  In addition, Ms. Bahl is assisting in establishing dialogue with Japanese and Russian colleagues to expand the federation.