Leon Minton Honored by NWS Southern Region

NWS Deputy Regional Director Steven Cooper (right) presents Certificate of Appreciation to IT Analyst Leon Minton.

(Aug. 5, 2005) -- Information Technology Analyst Leon Minton has received special recognition for his outstanding service to the National Weather Service and Southern Region Headquarters. During the last five years, Minton has been providing information technology expertise for the NWS Southern Region by virtue of a University of Oklahoma grant under the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) program.

A certificate of appreciation, signed by Southern Region Director Bill Proenza, was presented to Minton in a brief ceremony at SRH. It reads, In recognition of your outstanding and innovative programming support to the National Weather Service and Southern Region." Minton has been an integral part of many of the SRH's innovative programming efforts to support and enhance the Region's forecasting and warning capabilities.

One of the most recent innovations concerned the development of Spanish Language web pages to provide forecasts, watches, warnings, advisories and outlooks for the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. Working in concert with NWS forecasters, he applied his programming skills to help create seamless Spanish translations.

This work allows the Forecast Offices to use a new Interactive Forecast Preparation System (IFPS) to draw raw weather data directly from the NWS National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) to automatically create Spanish language Point Forecast pages. Hispanic visitors to NWS web sites in the Southern Region need only click on a link for instant Spanish language translations.