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Administrative Thoughts
Thu Dec 11, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher runs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As
such, he is ultimately responsible for everything from monitoring Sea Surface Temperatures to
your local forecast. I had the chance to talk with him in Norman, Oklahoma.
BRYAN: What are some of the surprises and frustrations you've experienced and also some of the
rewards in heading this huge organization?
CONRAD: The rewards are the people who are in this organization. They're dedicated,
enthusiastic and they're very talented and they're - they're just marvelous people to work
with. Some of the frustrations are, of course, are getting the word out to people, building
the partnerships as we're trying to do today here in Norman, to get the right information to
the right people at the right time so smart public policy decisions can be made. But we're
making progress.
BRYAN: So it seems like the information is there. Do you see one of the big problems as
getting it out to the community and how would you remedy that?
CONRAD: I think that we have been making progress, such as the expansion of NOAA weather
radio over the last 10 years and so we - we now have the opportunity to reach 95% of the
American public with NOAA weather radio. Now we have to work on advertising the benefits of
NOAA weather radio to the public. So there are programs that we're working on now to make it
easier for public to get the right information.
BRYAN: And you mentioned you do a lot with partnerships.
CONRAD: Partnerships are incredibly important. The information that we develop would be of no
use unless we had partnerships that took that information and took it right down to the
grassroots level for every member of the public.
The Weather Notebook is funded by Subaru and The National Science Foundation. We are online at
www.weathernotebook.org.
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