Dr. Roger (Roj) Marchand is a JISAO research scientist and principal investigator on several grants. Prior to coming to JISAO in March 2007, he had been working at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory since 1999. For much of this time, Marchand’s research has focused on improving cloud models and testing the representation of clouds in such models with remote sensing observations from millimeter wavelength radar, lidar and a variety passive remote sensing instrumentation from both satellites and ground-based systems.

Dr. Marchand is a member of the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program. The DOE ARM program maintains a number of heavily instrumented ground-based atmospheric observing sites, including sites in Lamont OK, Barrow AK and 3 sites in the Tropical Western Pacific (at Manus Island, Nauru Island, and Darwin Australia). These sites include cloud radar, lidar, and passive microwave system, which Marchand combines to make estimates of cloud properties (primarily water content and effective particle size). These data are also used both to evaluate satellite remote sensing retrievals. His most recent work has focused on analyzing output from the Multiscale Modeling Framework global climate model with observation from the NASA CloudSat mission (a 94 GHz spaceborne cloud radar system).

Dr. Marchand is not all about ‘clouds’. His interests & hobbies are just as exciting, and they include whitewater kayaking, snow boarding, hiking and playing ultimate disc.