The AIRS Project and team members extend their condolences on the passing of Dr. Gyula Molnar on October 18, 2012. Gyula was a good friend and colleague to his fellow researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a valued member of the overall AIRS science community as well. He will be missed by many.

Brief Biography of Dr. Gyula I. Molnar

Gyula Molnar received an M.S. degree in physics (1973) and a Ph.D. in geography/meteorology (1976) from the Roland Eotvos University of Budapest, Hungary. He was a civil servant with the Hungarian Meteorological Service until 1982, while in 1976-77 he has won a British Council Scholarship at the Department of Atmospheric Physics, Oxford University, Oxford, England to work on multispectral satellite retrievals of atmospheric parameters. He was invited as a Visiting Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado in1982 to work on developing satellite imagery-based cloud retrieval schemes.

In 1983 he joined AER, Inc. in Cambridge, MA and worked on projects mostly related to the evaluation of potential climate changes due to human activity. In 1994, he started work for the GOES Project at NASA/GSFC for improving cloud retrievals, and later to assess sea surface temperature/cloud/water vapor/climate interactions for the areas viewable from geostationary satellites. Starting in 1999, he was working in the AERI Project at UMBC (affiliated with GSFC) to develop carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane retrievals for an upward-looking infrared spectrometer.

Since 2003, he had been working for the AIRS-Project with Dr. Joel Susskind at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Gyula published over twenty refereed papers in satellite remote sensing and sounding, as well as in global climate change related topics. He joined GESTAR (also affiliated with GSFC) in 2011.