On November 16, NOAA Administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, and Kelly Wright, Director of NOAA’s Technology Partnerships Office, awarded the NOAA Patent Holders Award to James Ronald Jordan, James Harwood Churnside, and Paul Ernest Johnston of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL) for successfully patenting a system for “detection of transient signals in Doppler spectra”.

The patent, which was awarded in September 2011, expresses the skill of signal processing.  The detection of signals in the presence of noise can be a problem when the amplitude of the noise is greater than the signal itself.  This patent uses a statistical technique to detect the transient signals in power spectra, particularly Doppler spectra as used in radar and other related applications.