For NOAA’s 50th anniversary, we are highlighting oral history interviews from 24 employees -- some retired, some still working -- who have made a mark on the agency. Oral historian Molly Graham walks us through their NOAA legacies and the life experiences that led them here.
Dr. Eddie Bernard refers to himself as the “accidental tsunami guy.” In graduate school, a professor asked him to assist with a research project on tsunamis, and what followed was a 40-year career at NOAA where tsunami research and detection was a common thread in every position he held.
Dr. Bernard joined the NOAA Corps in 1970, serving in the first NOAA Corps class, since NOAA had only formed nine days prior to his enlistment. He served aboard the NOAA Ship Researcher for three years before joining a NOAA tsunami research group in Honolulu and completing a PhD at Texas A&M University. Dr. Bernard eventually took the helm of NOAA’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, where he oversaw the warning center’s transition to computer-assisted operations. In the early 1980s, he became director of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle where, thanks to experience from his tour in Honolulu, he helped lead development and operationalization of a deep ocean tsunami detection system (DART®) that transmits real time tsunami data.
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