2009: Gokhan Danabasoglu

Gokhan Danabasoglu is the recipient of the 2009 CCSM Distinguished Achievement Award. Gokhan has been instrumental in developing every version of the ocean component, starting from CCSM1. With Gokhan as co-chair of the Ocean Working Group, the ocean model component for CCSM4 was delivered on time, with everything incorporated as planned and more. It is our opinion that no one has been more key to this, and past versions of the ocean model than Gokhan.

Over the past five years, Gokhan has been the major CGD/CCSM player in the CLIVAR ocean mixing Climate Process Teams(CPTs). The success of these CPTs and the promise of more to come are critical to the future of CCSM ocean modeling and are very much due to Gokhan's efforts. The tangible results of these CPTs are two new modifications to the mesoscale eddy parameterization, a new parameterization of sub-mesoscale re-stratification, and parameterizations of gravity current overflows at Gibraltar, Denmark Strait, Faroe-Bank Channel, the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea. He has taken the lead role, in the evaluation of these parameterizations and is the first author on several related papers in the refereed literature.

Gokhan has also been a key contributor to numerous software engineering efforts related to ocean model development. He routinely provides contributions to all aspects of incorporating new software engineering changes and improvements to the ocean model code. He also interacts extensively with the CCSM Software Engineering Group (CSEG). For example, he is one of the few scientists that routinely use the CCSM scripts to run CCSM simulations. As a result, he has often provided valuable feedback to the CSEG group for ways to improve the usability and robustness of scripts for carrying out CCSM model simulations.