How do you quantify whether researchers, professionals, and the public actually use anything you created? For example, I have an h score of 37, which is likely somewhat below average for someone at my stage of a career. That does not assess whether anyone actually uses the information conveyed in journal articles. Here are some other metrics that touch on how difficult it is to measure impact of research:
• 40+ refereed journal articles in 2024 mention mesowest.utah.edu in the text without necessarily referencing the article recommended to be used for MesoWest,
• 600,000+ IP addresses (~people at one or more times) have accessed MesoWest software resources during 2024 and downloaded tens of millions pieces of environmental data.
The papers that actually reference the MesoWest paper or mesowest.utah.edu reflect a small fraction of actual use by the research community. However, it does highlight the range of topics for which the data are used: machine learning, environmental science, wildfire risk assessment, transportation, urban planning, ecology and wildlife studies, etc. In addition, the relatively small number of publications that cite our hrrr-zarr work to indicate they use our cloud archive are in the areas of weather analysis and forecasting, cloud computing & big data storage, flood & streamflow prediction, and AI & machine learning applications.
My group typically averages 10+ emails a week from people using MesoWest or other software that has been developed over the years. Our Alaska and Great Lakes Fire and Fuels software are relied upon by fire professionals in those regions for their decision support. The level of funding for those projects in the above table underestimate the true costs of the work involved. I have inevitably taken the approach that we are in part assisting government agencies as a “service”. More broadly, the NWS Weather Hazards Viewer developed by NWS Western Region and available for every region of the country relies on data obtained from Synoptic Data PBC, which is an outgrowth of MesoWest. Millions of people rely on the Hazards Viewer. My group also maintains a network of stations primarily across northern Utah relied upon for research but also contributes to monitoring hazardous conditions for protection of life and property.
