Full Name
Sandy MacDonald
Speaker Bio
Alexander MacDonald is an author and speaker who has devoted the last 20 years of his career to finding worldwide solutions to the global energy transformation. He retired in 2016 after 42 years in the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA).
He is the founding Director of the Global System Laboratory of the NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colorado. From 2005 to 2016 he was the Director of ESRL, a world leader in weather and climate research. In the 1980s and 1990s he led a team of NOAA scientists and engineers to develop two operational prototypes for NOAA’s National Weather Service: a system that combined advanced weather information for NWS offices (still a mainstay of NWS offices) and a system that allowed thousands of computers to work together on weather model predictions. The first in the world, it is now a central system of all global weather prediction centers.
He invented an educational display called Science On a Sphere, currently in over 200 museums worldwide and seen by over 50 million people/year. By the late 2020s, it will have educated over a billion people about planet Earth.
He led a research project at NOAA to determine the infrastructure to determine the lowest-cost, highest reliability energy system for the US. It led to a celebrated journal article rated in the 99th percentile of all NATURE magazine publications in 2016. The article described future electric energy systems making use of High Voltage Direct Current mesh networks called SuperGrids. These systems used natural gas generators to assure high reliability, and wind and solar generators to provide low-cost.
Dr. MacDonald’s PhD is from the University of Utah.
He is the founding Director of the Global System Laboratory of the NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colorado. From 2005 to 2016 he was the Director of ESRL, a world leader in weather and climate research. In the 1980s and 1990s he led a team of NOAA scientists and engineers to develop two operational prototypes for NOAA’s National Weather Service: a system that combined advanced weather information for NWS offices (still a mainstay of NWS offices) and a system that allowed thousands of computers to work together on weather model predictions. The first in the world, it is now a central system of all global weather prediction centers.
He invented an educational display called Science On a Sphere, currently in over 200 museums worldwide and seen by over 50 million people/year. By the late 2020s, it will have educated over a billion people about planet Earth.
He led a research project at NOAA to determine the infrastructure to determine the lowest-cost, highest reliability energy system for the US. It led to a celebrated journal article rated in the 99th percentile of all NATURE magazine publications in 2016. The article described future electric energy systems making use of High Voltage Direct Current mesh networks called SuperGrids. These systems used natural gas generators to assure high reliability, and wind and solar generators to provide low-cost.
Dr. MacDonald’s PhD is from the University of Utah.
Speaking At
