John Opatz is an Associate Scientist III in RAL at NCAR contributing his expertise to two DTC projects: the Enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) and METplus training.
John is highly skilled and the go-to scientist for reviewing Pull Requests across METplus repositories. He made 210 METplus GitHub contributions in 2022, defining new issues, committing code changes, updating documentation, and reviewing the work of others. John’s Pull Request reviews are detailed, thoughtful, and comprehensive. He often expands his testing beyond the narrow scope of the original issue to assess how the code would handle a variety of user inputs. He is agile in his ability to switch between roles and appreciates the perspectives of software developers, users, and scientists.
John coordinated the online tutorial updates for METplus v5.0 and led the formation of a METplus user advisory group in 2023. John played a significant role in developing valuable content for the METplus 2021 Training Series. He leads various METplus projects aimed at fostering engagement with NOAA/EMC, NOAA/CPC, and NCAR/MMM. He works closely with engineers to develop new METplus use cases to broaden their impact and application. John’s growth in responsibilities within a short span of time is commendable.
His leadership in the areas of customer engagement, community support, and use case development are commendable. He conducts himself in a respectful, professional manner. He actively listens to others and genuinely works to improve their understanding and use of the METplus products.
