• STAR Home
•  > Staff Directory
•  > Lidia Cucurill

Lidia Cucurill, is the Senior Physical Scientist for Quantitative Assessment within NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). She provides scientific leadership and strategic advice on quantitative assessments to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for NOAA’s observation assets, evaluating and optimizing the integration of diverse space-based and in-situ observations within operational numerical weather prediction.

Before transitioning to STAR, Lidia served as the Director of NOAA’s Quantitative Observing System Assessment Program (QOSAP) within OAR and NESDIS SAE. In these roles, she led the quantitative evaluation and optimization of current and proposed observations for Earth systems analysis and forecasting. Over a two-decade career at UCAR and NOAA, Lidia coded the data assimilation algorithms for the operational implementation of COSMIC and COSMIC-2 data into NOAA’s forecast models. She has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications and has served on numerous high-level committees. She currently serves as a Co-Chair of the NOAA Modeling Board’s Enabling Observations into Models Working Group, a technical advisor to the NOAA Observing Systems Committee (OSC), and a Steering Committee member of the UN Decade SynObs project.

Lidia has received several prestigious awards for her work, including the UCAR Outstanding Scientific and Technology Advancement Award (2007), the NOAA David Johnson Award (2011), two NOAA Bronze Medals (2010 and 2022), and the NESDIS LEO Administrative Teamwork Award (2025). She was named a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2016.

Lidia holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona and an M.S. in Theoretical Physics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a certified Federal Program and Project Manager (FAC-P/PM) by the Federal Acquisition Institute.

---

E-mail to: lidia.cucurill@noaa.gov