Company

Dr. Elizabeth Austin is CEO and Founder of WeatherExtreme Ltd., a research and consulting firm. Dr. Austin founded the company in 1994. She has held professor/research positions at the Desert Research Institute, Inc. and Sierra Nevada College, a four-year, private college in Incline Village, Nevada. She currently holds a Professorship at the University of Nevada, Reno’s Atmospheric Sciences Department. Elizabeth has been an active member of the National Weather Association for many years, she is an active member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), has served on many AMS Committees and was Chair of the Board of the Certified Consulting Meteorologists (CCM). She has been a member of the AMS Council and has been President of the Association of Certified Meteorologists.Elizabeth is the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Specialist award at the Laboratoire de Physique de l’Atmosphère, CNRS, Universitè de La Rèunion, Rèunion Island, France and the distinguished teaching award at the four-year Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village Nevada. Elizabeth is the recipient of the AMS Henry T. Harrison Award for Outstanding Contributions by a Consulting Meteorologist and she is an elected Fellow of the AMS. She is the Chief Scientist for the Perlan Project to fly a manned glider to 100,000 feet. Her areas of specialty include forensic meteorology, aviation meteorology, mountain weather, mesocale atmospheric modeling, cloud and ice physics, education, and stratospheric mountain waves. Elizabeth has appeared on-air all over the world (Germany, China, New Zealand, France, Australia and the USA), lectured and taught courses and seminars on weather and climate all over the world.

Elizabeth’s forensic meteorology experience has ranged from civil to criminal cases including a double-murder, death-penalty case; to State and Federal cases; to foreign court cases. She has worked on well over 1,500 cases ranging from aviation, wildfires, auto accidents, agriculture, kite-surfing, boating, equipment malfunctions, avalanches, skiing accidents, and tornadoes. Dr. Austin’s book, Treading on Thin Air, is published by Pegasus Books.

James “Jim” Purpura is Director of Weather Forecasting & International Operations at WeatherExtreme Ltd. Jim retired from the National Weather Service with 32 years of experience. He was the Director of the San Diego National Weather Service (2003-2011) and the Corpus Christi National Weather Service (2002-2003). Jim spent 15 years in the NWS in tornado alley, in Norman, Oklahoma using NEXRAD Doppler Radar to issue tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings. He has worked extensively with media, and with Emergency Managers to develop effective weather safety plans for large public venues such as schools, businesses, and sports stadiums. These plans were credited in saving lives during the violent tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma in 1999.

Jim received a Gold Medal from the Department of Commerce (its highest honor) for developing a special warning service for the disabled. Jim has also earned the title Certified Consulting Meteorologist (CCM), as awarded by the American Meteorological Society.

Alan Austin is President of WeatherExtreme Ltd. and has a background in aviation, graphics/media and film. Alan holds an ATP rating and single engine seaplane rating. He’s flown a wide variety of piston, turbine and turbojet aircraft including single and multi- engine airplanes, helicopters and seaplanes. He has an honorable discharge from the United States Navy. He was an instrument instructor for airplanes and helicopters and holds type ratings in Citation 1 & 11, Lear 24/25/35/55 and the Hawker 400, 600 700 & 800. Flight schools and safety classes include Flight Safety for Cessna, Simuflight for Lear & Hawker, school for Aerospatiale 350/355, Bell School 206B & 206L and Bruce Watson Approved School for Challenger 600. Alan Austin’s experience in aviation includes flying for American Airlines, flying in the movies (Screen Actor’s Guild Pilot) as a stunt pilot and for aerial photography, and as a charter pilot. He’s also flown as a story ship pilot and camera ship pilot for film and TV Commercials in both airplanes and helicopters.

Alan Austin also has a strong background in film, art, graphics and photography. Alan was the owner/operator of Hangar 9 Studios in Santa Monica, California, one of Los Angeles’ largest fashion studios which produced projects, videos, film, commercials, print and was a full production studio. Alan was a fashion photographer in Milan, London, Germany, New York, Paris and Los Angeles. He also owned Sunshine Studios in Los Angeles for over 5 years which was a print production studio and produced over 400 annual reports, collateral graphics, logo campaigns and corporate branding.

Patrick Williams is Vice President & the Director of Visual Communications at WeatherExtreme Ltd. He has been at WeatherExtreme since 2001. His background is in art, art direction, design, digital assets and teaching. Prior to joining WeatherExtreme, Patrick was the Art Director for several magazines, was a freelance graphic artist and also taught art to special needs children ages 5-18 at Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services in Los Angeles, California.

Mr. Williams’ work at WeatherExtreme includes creating graphics and animations for courtroom trials; working with radar and satellite imaging software and merging these data, graphics and animations with terrain; three- and four-dimensional animations; and is proficient in both graphics and atmospheric visualization software. At WeatherExtreme, Patrick has worked graphics for specialized weather predictions and he has also worked on hundreds of forensic meteorology cases ranging from plane crashes to automobile pileups to shipping/maritime accidents to building collapses. As Vice President, Mr. Williams’ work includes overseeing operations, coordinating graphics, presentations and visual productions at WeatherExtreme Ltd.

Dr. James “Jim” Means is a Senior Atmospheric & Climate Scientist at WeatherExtreme Ltd. Jim began working with WeatherExtreme in 2011, shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCSD. With WeatherExtreme he works on a variety of forensic meteorology projects in addition to both synoptic and seasonal forecasting. Dr. Means also runs the Weather Research & Forecasting System (WRF) model for WeatherExtreme’s many projects including the Perlan Project. Jim also takes the lead on providing the daily weather forecasts to the Perlan pilot’s and crew when they are flying in Argentina and in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Nevada/California.

Previously he worked with meteorologists from SDG&E and the Southern California GACC to develop the Santa Ana Wildfire Threat Index. At Scripps he developed a novel way of using reanalysis of past weather in combination with the delays of GPS signals traveling from satellites to receivers on the ground, in order to map out water vapor in the atmosphere. Analysis of this data has led to better understanding of “atmospheric river” type storms that often produce flooding in California, the onset and retreat of the North American Monsoon onset and retreat, and the climatological aspects of water vapor distribution. As a research scientist with Quasar Federal Systems he did field testing of a new type of lightning detector. He has also worked on a variety of projects outside atmospheric science, including work at Quantum Magnetics where he developed advanced land mine detectors.

Stephen “Steve” Goates is the Director of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at WeatherExtreme Ltd. and has been with the company since January of 2000. In addition to expertise in GIS, Steve also runs mesoscale atmospheric models and is able to synergize multiple data from various sources and platforms into one product. Steve works on forensic meteorology cases, the Perlan Project, avalanche studies, and weather & climate research studies.

Mr. Goates has worked on national and international projects for WeatherExtreme including implementing real-time weather forecasting at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (Armstrong), modeling and forecasting stratospheric mountain waves & the polar vortex over New Zealand (NASA funded project), the Pacific Jets Landfalling Experiments (PACJET) (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration – NOAA project) of wind profiler derived snow algorithm, the Alpine Meadows/Wolf Creek Ski Resort Avalanche Hazard Assessment, meteorological modeling support for the NASA X-43A Supersonic Flight Project, and GIS mapping and analysis of severe icing pilot reports (PIREPs) a decade period of time over the continental United States to analyze icing type terrain, altitude, aircraft type and climate.

Providing software development, database design and maintenance, UNIX/Linux system administration & Web server administration.

Software development in PHP, C, Perl, Python, and other languages; Web administration and applications development; database design and programming in MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and MS SQL; Solaris and Linux system administration; project management; computer security, including development of policies, writing scanner and log analysis utilities, writing proxy-based firewall software; conduct workshops in HTML, UNIX shells, and various programming languages and scripts

Specialties: UNIX system administration, C programming, Javascript, Ajax, PHP, CSS, HTML, XML, network design and maintenance, firewalls, computer security, project and team management, Web server administration, Postgres, MySQL, MS SQL, and Oracle databases; secure credit card, e-commerce, and survey services

Jackie joined WeatherExtreme in 2021 as a Remote Sensing/GIS Scientist.  She is an instructor at Harper College, Northern Illinois University, and Elmhurst University teaching Geographic Information Systems (GIS), physical and human geography, earth science, and physical and environmental geology.  Invited talks include topics such as data geovisualization, GIS in emergency management, planetary remote sensing, and planetary cartography. Inside and outside the classroom, Jackie focuses on the integration of GIS/Remote Sensing and spatial analysis with emergency management and hazards analysis.  She worked with local emergency management agencies and academic leaders on the benefits of coupling geospatial technologies with emergency management concepts and practices.  Her master’s thesis research centered around the spatial and statistical analyses of groundwater contamination in the karst topography of the Yucatán Peninsula. 

Mr. Brad N. Grant joined the WeatherExtreme team as an Atmospheric Scientist in August 2022.

Mr. Grant has over 30 years’ experience as a Meteorologist/Team Leader for NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS). In that role, Brad served as an instructor for the NWS WSR-88D Program and the Warning Decision Training Division (WDTD) of the Office of the Chief Learning Officer.

Brad served as a Technical Advisor for the University of Oklahoma’s Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorology Studies (CIMMS) research staff. Over the years he led training projects on severe weather prediction and detection, warning decision making, winter weather, flash flooding, impact-based warnings, and decision support services. Mr. Grant helped develop an innovative method to provide situational awareness and severe weather training directly to all NWS operational forecasters to improve warning services and reduce costs, which was part of a team NWS Bronze Medal Award in 2005. As part of professional development onboarding program, he developed for WDTD, Brad provided monthly seminars on interdisciplinary topics to accelerate research to operations to improve office mission. For that effort, the NWS awarded Mr. Grant the Isaac M. Kline Award in 2019. Mr. Grant has led numerous training projects as Team Leader for WDTD including Science and Operations Officer (SOO) workshops to address operational impacts of hazardous weather and to plan the future direction of severe weather training needs. Mr. Grant has also worked as a severe weather specialist for the Storm Prediction Center and has conducted research on proximity soundings for elevated severe storms. He also has experience working in broadcast media for WTVT/Gulf Coast Weather Service in Tampa, FL.

Over the years, Mr. Grant has presented at national conferences for the National Weather Association (NWA), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Association of Talent Development (ATD). In addition, he has published papers for the National Weather Digest and National Weather Service Technical Attachments.

Kathleen Clough joined the WeatherExtreme Team in 2025 as an Atmospheric Scientist specializing in fire weather. Kathleen is currently an Atmospheric Scientist at WeatherExtreme Ltd., and Ph.D. student at the University of Nevada Reno with a focus on wildfire modeling with WRF-SFIRE. She has provided, and continues to provide, modeling and in-the-field support for similar campaigns, specifically FASMEE since the Fall of 2023 (ongoing) and CalFiDE in 2022, where she not only forecasted fires of interest twice a day but was also on the ground with the San Jose State University radar truck, co-located with Dr. Lareau’s LiDAR team. She has worked extensively with WRF-SFIRE, including real-time fire spread forecasting for entire fire seasons, as well as post-fire model performance validation, specifically validation of plume height using remotely sensed plume observations. Kathleen is fire-line qualified and is red-carded as a Technical Specialist – Fire Meteorologist through the Nevada Bureau of Land Management where she most recently provided operational fire weather support through Predictive Services for the Great Basin GACC during the Summer of 2024.

Clifford Ehrke joined the WeatherExtreme Team in 2025 as an Atmospheric Scientist specializing in fire weather. Cliff has experience in fieldwork, modeling and forecasting weather and wildfires in coupled simulations; and analyzing weather patterns and fire behavior during wildfire events. Mr. Ehrke has employed machine learning for a fire spread model containing WRF-SFIRE recreations of large fires for the purpose of developing a machine learning based fire rate spread model capable of running faster and more accurately than traditional empirical approaches. He has also worked to deploy multiple microwave water level sensors along the Texas coastline for the purpose of building a dataset of significant wave height during coastal inundation events.

Frank Brody is an Atmospheric Scientist at WeatherExtreme Ltd. Frank retired from the National Weather Service (NWS) with 40 years of experience. He was Meteorologist in Charge of the NWS National Aviation Meteorologists embedded within the FAA Air Traffic Control Systems Command Center (2014-2017), providing forecasts and briefings supporting the National Airspace. He was a member of FAA’s Collaborative Decision Making Weather Evaluation Team and implemented NWS weather support for FAA’s Plan-Evaluate-Review-Train-Improve (PERTI) initiative. Frank was MIC of the NWS Spaceflight Meteorology Group (SMG) embedded in the NASA Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center (1991-2014). He led and managed SMG’s weather decision support for 98 Space Shuttle missions and several other NASA weather-sensitive operations. Prior NWS positions included forecaster and lead forecaster at NCEP (then NMC), forecaster at NWS Raleigh NC, and forecaster at NWS Charleston WV. Prior consulting work has included Booz Allen Hamilton, Alaska Airlines, I.M. Systems Group, and UCAR/COMET. Frank is a member of the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. Frank’s specialties include weather forecasting, aviation and spaceflight meteorology, integrated weather decision support, and weather training.

Moody Austin joined WeatherExtreme in 2023 as an Intern. Moody works on social media, business management, marketing and PR. Moody creates training videos and helps with training staff on how to use various project management and communications software. Moody is currently pursuing his AA and BS degrees in Business.

Bill Read enjoyed a 35-year career with the National Weather Service, retiring in 2012 as Director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami. Prior to his serving at NHC, Bill was Meteorologist in Charge of the National Weather Service (NWS) Forecast Office in League City, Texas. Other NWS career assignments included Severe Storms & Flash Flood Program Leader at the agency’s headquarters in Silver Springs, MD, Forecaster at NWS forecast offices in Fort Worth and San Antonio, and research meteorologist in the NWS Test and Evaluation Division in Sterling VA. Bill served five years as an officer in the US Navy including two years flying with the Navy Hurricane Hunters out of Jacksonville, FL, one year as a forecaster in Keflavik, Iceland and one year as Officer in Charge, Navy Weather Detachment in Kingsville, TX. In retirement, Bill serves as moderator/MC for the National Tropical Weather Conference in person and weekly online training during hurricane season aimed at broadcast meteorologists.

Bill earned the Bachelor of Science degree (’71) and Master of Science degree (‘76) in Meteorology from Texas A&M University. The University’s College of Geosciences awarded him the prestigious Halbouty Award for career achievement in the Geosciences.

He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and has served as President of the National Weather Association (2003).

Gary Ellrod joined the WeatherExtreme team in 2023 as a Senior Meteorologist.

Gary Ellrod is famous for developing the Ellrod Index in meteorology which is a technique for forecasting clear-air turbulence (CAT).

Mr. Ellrod has over 45 years of experience as a meteorologist, scientist and a forecaster. Gary’s experience includes: Five years of service in the U.S. Air Force as a weather forecaster, aerial weather reconnaissance officer (hurricane hunter) and missile launch control officer. Following brief stints as a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Wyoming), Mr. Ellrod was a National Weather Service (NWS) aviation, public, and marine forecaster in Seattle, WA and Washington, DC.

The bulk of Gary’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) career (nearly 30 years) was spent with the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) near Washington, DC where he developed techniques for the detection and short-range prediction of aviation hazards (fog, turbulence, icing, volcanic ash, and thunderstorm microbursts) using both multi-spectral satellite and numerical model data.

He developed and conducted numerous satellite training workshops on aviation and marine weather for the Cooperative Program for Meteorological Education and Training (COMET) program, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Most recently (Dec. 2018), he conducted several COMET classes on in-flight turbulence and satellite applications for the Korean Meteorological Administration in Boulder, CO.

Forensic experience during his NOAA career involved several informal investigations of severe turbulence encounters for commercial airlines, serving as a member of the NOAA Disaster Assessment Team for Hurricane Hugo (1989) and publication of a summary article on the use of satellite data in the investigation of roadway accidents caused by dense fog. After Mr. Ellrod retired from NOAA in 2006, he began private consulting.

Gary earned the title Certified Consulting Meteorologists (CCM), as awarded by the American Meteorological Society.

Dr. Gino Passalacqua is a Oceanic & Atmospheric Scientist at WeatherExtreme Ltd. He is a multi-talented coastal oceanographer and have over 25 years of experience in fisheries, climate science, and atmospheric & oceanographic modeling. Dr. Passalacqua’s experience includes research at Scripps Institute of Oceanography/UCSD and the Centro de Investigación Cientifica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) in the Physical Oceanography Department.

Gino is passionate about El Niño prediction, impact assessment, and climate risk evaluation through the application of advanced technological solutions and monitoring tools. Dr. Passalacqua is a Scientific Advisor for the Save the Wave Coalition (STW) in San Diego, California. Gino speaks English, Spanish (Native) and French.

Nicholas Whitehorn started at WeatherExtreme in 2025 part time and joined as a full employee in 2026 as a Full Stack Web Developer. He leads the design, maintenance, and security of the company’s web infrastructure, ensuring the firm’s digital platforms are efficient, maintainable, and aligned with modern web standards. His work spans frontend development, backend integration, and containerized deployment pipelines, making him a versatile asset across the full technology stack.

Nicholas is proficient with the T3 stack, building responsive, user-centered interfaces while implementing secure backend connections and configuration management processes. He also oversees containerization strategies, automated deployments, LAMP stack modifications and deployments, and overall system reliability, ensuring that both internal and client-facing platforms perform consistently and securely.

Beyond his technical expertise, Nicholas serves as the first point of contact for incoming communications, fielding calls and inquiries before coordinating with the appropriate teams for follow-up. In addition, he manages day-to-day office operations and facilitates internal workflows, bridging technical, operational, and administrative responsibilities. His broad skill set allows him to integrate development, security, and operational oversight seamlessly, keeping both the firm’s digital and organizational infrastructure running smoothly.

Alexander Tardy is a senior meteorologist at WeatherExtreme, providing forensic meteorology and expert analysis of complex weather and climate events. His work integrates operational forecasting, applied research, and public-facing scientific communication.

Alex has 32 years of federal experience since 1993. He has extensive experience as a public speaker and educator on atmospheric science and climate. A dozen individual, co-authored university and non- profit climate and atmospheric published science literature and public outreach educational material. Recognized as a climate leader by the San Diego Region Climate Education Partners and received a 2020 American Red Cross Hero Award for public outreach and weather risk education and preparedness.

Manager In the National Weather Service positions of Science and Operations Officer and Warning Coordination Meteorologist drove NWS offices through leadership in research, innovation, decision support services including conducting over 100 webinars, hundreds of public speaking presentations and media interviews, numerous public education documentaries, over 500 case studies, dozens of public flood, tsunami and rip current hazard kiosks and road signs, deep partner relationships, public outreach, collaboration, participation in volunteer organizations, sharing information, technology infusion and operational forecasting for public warning and service.