Joel Cline (Fed)

Mr. Joel Cline is the Director of the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. Mr. Cline will coordinate the research and implementation activities for the four NWIRP agencies – the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NIST (lead agency), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). NIST promotes the implementation of windstorm risk reduction measures; supports the development of performance-based engineering tools to lessen windstorm impact; and coordinates federal post-windstorm investigations to the extent practicable.

Previously, Mr. Cline was the Tropical Program Coordinator at NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. He coordinated policy and procedures to aid tropical forecasting including outreach, education and training of forecasters, public, media, and other NWS partners. He worked at the National Hurricane Center (NHC) (1987-1996) as a forecaster during Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 hurricane that directly damaged the NHC in 1992. He also worked as a lead forecaster in Raleigh, NC (1997- 2002), the lead forecaster and Chief of weather forecasting for the 1999 World Games of the Special Olympics, an Olympic Forecaster in 2002 for the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Salt Lake City, and as an Incident Meteorologist working on western U.S. wildfires (2003-2007), program manager for the Pacific Region of the NWS (2002- 2007), as a Program Coordination Officer for the Leadership Development Program for the NOAA Administrator (2008), and as a liaison to the development for meteorology in renewable development for meteorology in renewable energies focusing on wind energy (2012- 2017).   He was detailed to the NOAA Office of Atmospheric Research (OAR) at the Global Systems Lab to initiate a Program Management Office for the lab in 2022 and was the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Law Coordinator for NOAA and the NWS where he coordinated and managed the BIL funding Congress provided to NOAA for research and development across the NOAA portfolio totaling $904M (2023-2024). 

Mr. Cline was part of a team which completed a service assessment of Hurricane Michael (2018) and he continues to work with NIST to study Hurricane Maria (2017) in Puerto Rico. He led efforts to revamp tropical training on a variety of topics related to tropical cyclones and NHC products, including forecast uncertainty and messaging.

Mr. Cline has served as a presenter at numerous scientific meetings, including the American Meteorological Society (AMS),  American Geophysical Union (AGU), National Weather Association (NWA), International Energy Association, American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) He has written numerous scientific journal articles that were published in the AMS publications of the Bulletin of AMS, Weather and Forecasting, Monthly Weather Review and Wind Energy. 

Mr. Cline is a Project Management Professional (PMP - 2013) and has awards including the ESIG’s highest award for advancing wind energy forecasting, multiple NWS Isaac Cline Awards, Bronze and Gold Medals from the Department of Commerce and an honorary Ph.D. from Texas Tech for work with wind forecasting.