field programs

Native American Heritage Month Spotlight: Robbie Hood

Robbie Hood

November is National Native American Heritage Month. In this post, we spotlight the exceptional career of one of our Native American community members: Robbie Hood.

Hood is an atmospheric scientist with over 30 years of experience at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Can you tell us a few highlights of your current or most recent work?

I am a Cherokee meteorologist who worked with NASA and NOAA for a combined total of 30 years. Now in retirement, I am collaborating with NCAR personnel to explore how low-cost 3-D printed weather stations could be used by Indigenous communities for student training and tribal decision-making. I have also been collaborating with the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences to plan the program for the 2025 AMS Heather Lazrus Symposium to be held during the 105th AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans. In this symposium, I will be moderating a panel discussion focused on cultivating tribal and community partnerships within the weather, water, and climate enterprise.

What was an important moment in your early career?

I started my meteorological career as scientific programmer, but I was given an opportunity to step out of my comfort zone at NASA. I became the project scientist for a new passive microwave aircraft instrument that could observe precipitation within thunderstorms and hurricanes. This move gave me the opportunity to work with and, eventually, lead teams of renowned scientists, engineers, and pilots during large international weather field experiments that were conducted in places like Australia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cape Verde, and the Marshall Islands. Along the way, I got to fly through four different hurricanes, all because I initially stepped out of my comfort zone.

What is something you’re proud of professionally?

My experience leading weather field experiments led me to become the manager of a NOAA program to test the potential benefit of drones and remotely piloted aircraft for operational application. In this role, I was able to organize and fund a multi-million-dollar field experiment to test, for the very first time, the capabilities of a high-altitude Global Hawk remotely piloted aircraft that was controlled from a central command center in Virginia to fly over and observe the characteristics of hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. During these missions, relevant data were successfully sent in near-real time to meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center to assist in their forecasts. Later research studying the impact of Global Hawk data assimilated into weather prediction models demonstrated positive results.

Are there ways in which your Native heritage has influenced or enriched your career?

I credit my Cherokee mother for teaching me to listen closely to how people tell their stories and pay attention to their feelings and expressions as they talk. She thought this would help me better understand who they are and how things looked from their point of view. These skills have helped me build good working relationships and strong collaborations throughout my career.

Not Seasick…Science Smitten

What if you are asked to be part of a scientific expedition aboard a non-luxurious research vessel, surrounded by complete strangers, forced to face rough seas – and sea sickness, 16 hours’ work shifts, no weekends or recreational activities, no days off, lots of hours under the sun working with scientific equipment, poor internet connectivity and no interaction whatsoever with the outer world? While many people would say: “no thank you”, I was euphoric when I received an email which first line read: “Congratulations, you have been selected as a participant of the Sixth Aerosols and Oceans Science Expedition”.

So begins Mayra Oyola’s engaging story of work aboard the NOAA research vessel Ronald H. Brown for the AEROSE campaign

Beside The Ronald H. Brown.

under the auspices of Howard University, NOAA, and other institutions. It was apparently a love affair not just with the science and the sea, but with a lidar, too:

[E]very scientist is …assigned at least one particular instrument and is expected to become the one and only expert on that matter.  In a sense, every scientist establishes a sort of “bond” with his/her assigned instrument that is very similar romantic affair. You can grow such a strong love and hate relationship with it. There are days when you two can get along just fine. But other days you have to fight against temptations (like throwing it overboard or smashing it with a sledge hammer). There are days when your appointed instrument gets seduced by Murphy (in other words, goes haywire) and you have to make him/her understand that s/he is in a monogamous relationship with you.  As some partners, these instruments can be gold diggers (they cost hundreds/thousands of dollars) and are high maintenance as well.

And, this enticing view of the ocean:

When people say I must be crazy to have loved so much sailing on this expedition, I just ask them a couple of questions: Have you seen bioluminescence or done some fishing in the middle of the Atlantic basin? Or have you ever had the chance to catch a movie under the stars in the middle of the Sea? Well, I had.  There are some great perks about sailing on the Brown. There is nothing as beautiful as lying on deck at night for the most spectacular stargazing sessions you will experience in this world.  There are unusual things that you will never see in your everyday life: like watching a double rainbow or the most impressive towering cumulonimbus cloud EVER at the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITZC). I also loved watching different marine life forms like the flying fishes, dolphins and squids (oh yeah, we saw squids!). Oh and the sunsets… sunsets that will take your breath away!….But the highest reward is this:  we get to do REAL science to solve REAL problems, such as improving the quality of satellite operations,   understanding the effects of aerosols in hurricane formation and intensification and learning how tropospheric ozone can be linked to global warming, among many other things. There is nothing that can top that!

Check out the full story, and picture gallery, here, and kudos to Oyola for such drawing a compelling portrait of science at sea. We talk about the need to communicate science, and we’ll talk more about it as the Annual Meeting approaches, but she’s set a strong example already.